As usual, bop over to Compound Interest if you’d like a version of the image where the small text is actually text.
Don’t say that Donald Trump has never done anything for this nation. With a single mangled spelling (and really, with the frequency and brutality with which he gets these things past the spellchecker, at some point you have to believe it’s intentional) Trump has given us a word that sums up how half the nation, plus three million, feel at this moment.
Unpresidented. It’s a word that rolls off the tongue. Not just an alternative to “Not my president,” but an alternative that includes all the “un” that defines Trump. Unqualified. Untruthful. Unreliable. Unjust. Uncouth. Unkind. Unconscionable. Unimaginable. Unbearable. Unconscious. Unacceptable. Unpresidential.
Thank you, Mr. Unpresident.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about how the actual incident with the drone turned out, Donald Trump soon demonstrated that he was unwilling and unable to devote himself to any problem longer than a Viagra commercial.
But fortunately, at the moment, we’re still un-unpresidented. So in the real world.
“Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the U.U.V. to the United States,” said Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, using initials to refer to the Navy’s unmanned underwater vehicle.
Now come on in. Let’s pundit.
This is one of those weeks when much of punditry is already on their extended holiday break. So names are missing from the day’s stack. Enjoy it while you can.
Jonathan Freedland on why “post-truth” is as deceptive as “alt-right.”
As Aleppo endured its final agonies, the simple act of circulating any account – a video, a photograph, a news report – would trigger an unnerving response. Someone, somewhere would reply that the photograph was doctored, the source was a stooge, the rescued child was not really a child or not really rescued.
Of course, we’re used to people taking different sides on conflicts far away, arguing bitterly over who is to blame. At its most extreme, it results in a newspaper like the Morning Star sinking so low that it hails the human devastation of Aleppo – where every hospital was bombed and where the slaughter of civilians became routine – not as a crime, but as a “liberation”.
It’s almost easier to take that kind of lie, the kind that is simply and easily seen as propaganda, over the batnuts insanity that produces things like pizzagate, or the dead-headed thudding certainty that allows Donald Trump to tweet that “the head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate.” In terms that President Lincoln would appreciate, fighting this sort of lie is like shoveling fleas across the barnyard. With a pitchfork. Because refuting the lies takes much more effort and explanation than tossing them out there, and the people who believe the lies? They’re going to go right back to screaming “nuh uh” no matter what you say.
We’ve been calling this “post-truth politics” but I now worry that the phrase is far too gentle, suggesting society has simply reached some new phase in its development. It lets off the guilty too lightly. What Trump is doing is not “engaging in post-truth politics”. He’s lying.
Freedland’s examples this morning are good. Go forth and read it all.
Michael Mann on practicing science in the new dark age.
I’ve faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family. Those threats have diminished in recent years, as man-made climate change has become recognized as the overwhelming scientific consensus and as climate science has received the support of the federal government. But with the coming Trump administration, my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government. It would be bad for our work and bad for our planet.
Trump was asked about climate change in the interview in which New York Times reporters seemed to be so glad that he hadn’t summoned them to the Tower for a beheading that they failed to question any of the idiocy he spouted. His climate change idiocy was to talk about “those scientists with their emails,” referring to that great moment when right-wing hackers broken into email accounts of climate scientists and found … nothing wrong. Nothing, despite a Benghazi-worth of investigations. Zip. Nada. And yet, Trump and the rest of the right are still convinced they found something. Though Trump couldn’t tell you what that something was supposed to be if you put totally-no polluting flaming coals to his feet.
Donald Trump, of course, famously dismissed global warming as a Chinese hoax and “a big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money.” This month, he framed his position on climate change as “nobody really knows — it’s not something that’s so hard and fast.” He has vowed to cancel U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement and threatened to block the Clean Power Plan, a measure to reduce carbon emissions in the power sector.
Mann gave me a nice quote for my book, The Evolution of Everything.
John Podesta on the failure of the FBI.
The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets. The former acting director of the CIA has called the Russian cyberattack “the political equivalent of 9/11.” Just as after the real 9/11, we need a robust, independent investigation into what went wrong inside the government and how to better protect our country in the future.
What happens seems to be that Rudy’s pals in the New York office played on Comey’s incredibly huge opinion of himself to get the FBI director to issue a pointless, needless letter that on its own was almost certainly enough to account for the 1% difference that decided the election. But, just to be sure, the same New York office guys called the New York Times just as the story on Russia was starting to take off and assured them that the FBI had determined that there was nothing to see here. Nope. Nothing going on. No point to Russia’s actions. No connections between Trump and Russia. All checked out, nothing to it. Which the New York Times dutifully published.
And the rest was history. Miserable, miserable history.
I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.” As a former head of the FBI cyber division told the Times, this is a baffling decision: “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana.”
Did the Times mention all the snickering and high fives over at the FBI office? Because, you just know there was a lot.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner shares with you the thrilling truth about Steve Bannon’s rap version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Soon after Stephen K. Bannon was appointed chief strategist for President-elect Donald J. Trump, profiles noted that he was a co-author of a rap musical based on Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy “Coriolanus.” … Coming just after Mr. Trump denounced the hip-hop hit “Hamilton” as “overrated,” the news that his right-hand man had scripted a hip-hop statesman himself felt almost comical.
Actually, the news that Bannon considered Coriolanus his favorite Shakespeare play should be enough to chill anyone’s bones. And that’s before you discover that Bannon’s idea of making Coriolanus Rap is to move the story to the 1992 LA riots and turn it into yet another in the endless alt-white series of “do you want to have a race war?”
The dialogue reads like a parody of gang slang (“I’m an O.G. from the ’hood come to speak with Coriolanus”), but the battle scenes hurtle along, and a characteristic Bannon theme emerges. Coriolanus, the Bloods’ enforcer, becomes an “in-your-face hammer” who won’t deliver the politically correct messages his handlers want.
The battle scenes “hurtle along” accompanied by stage directions like “they break into an Ultimate Flight Champions meets Hong Kong Swordplay.” Seriously. Friends, un-friends, countrymen … this bozo is getting an office in the White House.
Michael Eric Dyson on why Trump is so eager to buy the Bannon version of black America.
If there is a dirty secret in American life, it is this: The real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology, is white identity masked as universal, neutral and, therefore, quintessentially American. The greatest purveyors of identity politics today, and for the bulk of our country’s history, have been white citizens.
That’s why “giving up identity politics” and “catering to white men” are synonymous phrases.
Mr. Trump’s views on black people, poverty and cities were quickly challenged as myopic and ill informed. But the administration he is building is emblematic of his ignorance.
During his presidential campaign Mr. Trump tweeted out a grossly inaccurate image from a nonexistent “Crime Statistics Bureau” that suggested that the bulk of white people are killed by black people — a belief that white bigots have long parroted as the reason for their racist revenge
Trump doesn’t feel any need to know black people. He only needs to know what Trump voters think black people are like. Now that he has his hands on actual agencies, you can bet they’ll be finding ways to publish racist drivel every bit as corrosive as the “Crime Statistics Bureau” and keep those stereotypes alive.
Carole Cadwalladr on going down the wrong fork in the technology road.
In 2009 ... Gordon Brown stepped on to the TED stage. The Silicon Valley thinkfest had come to Britain and he was there to talk about politics, technology and what he called “the creation of a truly global society”.
He had a powerful message to deliver. “The power of our moral sense, allied to the power of communications,” he said, along with “our ability to organise internationally”, would enable us “to fundamentally change the world”.
Everyone nodded along with Brown, but there was another message that day.
A young, then unknown, Belarusian academic – Evgeny Morozov. He had a different message. Authoritarian regimes, he said, can and did use technology for their purposes, too. Technology and freedom were not obliged to go together. And if you were born in Belarus, you’d smell the bullshit a mile off.
In this post-Trump Twitter, fake news littered world, where alt-white neo-nazis demonstrate daily how to smear everyone for fun and profit, it’s easy to dismiss Brown’s talk. But the thing is, in the long term, Brown better be right.
Fareed Zakaria tries to make sense of a Republican unpresident who undid everything the Republicans say they stand for.
The president-elect has consistently signaled that he wants to be accommodating toward Russia and get tough on China. But that sees the world almost backward. China is, for the most part, comfortable with the U.S.-led international system. Russia is trying to upend it.
Does China have an envelope full of things Trump did on his trip to Moscow? No? All right then. And for everyone who ever thought “well, when Romney said Russia was a threat ...” was a great comeback. No. It’s not. Russia’s objective power is not the problem here.
Obama’s rationale for contradicting Romney was that Russia was a “regional power,” one in economic decline. That made it a nuisance but not a grave global threat. This is an accurate reading of Russia’s position, which has only gotten worse since 2012. The country’s economy has actually shrunk for two years now. The Economist points out that, over the past decade, state spending has risen from 35 percent of gross domestic product to a staggering 70 percent. The ruble has collapsed. The country’s sovereign debt is now rated as junk by Moody’s.
Remember how keen Donald Trump was on keeping sanctions against Iran, saying we had them right at the brink of failure and let them up? Iran was not at the brink of failure. But Russia is. If oil prices stay low, and sanctions keep them from taking a monster payday from Trump’s new Secretary of Exxon Mobil, Putin’s government is in serious trouble.
Why is Russia attacking the United States with cyber warfare? Because it’s cheap. It’s the new asymmetrical war. It’s the IED of the Internet. It’s a desperation move, and Russia is all in.
We are now gaining a fuller picture of Russia’s use of its power, which began years ago, with operations in Russia itself, then in Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany and other European countries and, finally, in the United States during the last presidential campaign. In each case, Moscow directed a full-spectrum strategy, including hacking, trolling, fake news and counterintelligence aimed at discrediting targeted politicians, interfering with campaigns and tilting elections.
The best way to counter Russia’s cyber war? Don’t give them the money they need to take it into real space.
Nicholas Kristof on Donald Trump, Putin pet.
We have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering [than Watergate]. Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats’ digital offices and tried to change the election outcome. ...
In Watergate, the break-in didn’t affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don’t know for sure. There were other factors, but it’s possible that Russia’s theft and release of the emails provided the margin for Donald Trump’s victory.
Considering the narrowness of Trump’s electoral win, it seems likely that it wasn’t one thing that put him over the top. It was everything. If the press hadn’t spent more time on Hillary’s email than every Trump scandal put together, that would have been enough. If Comey had not put out his letter, that would have been enough. And if Russia had not dangled a sweet promise of scandal that the press was all too eager to suck down, that would have been enough.
Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and Trump by denouncing the C.I.A. and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America’s intelligence community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the dictator.
Trump’s real support for Putin hasn’t even started. But it will.
Masha Gessen and truth vs. autocrats.
Last week, it emerged that the Central Intelligence Agency had concluded that in the later stages of the presidential campaign Russia acted not merely to disrupt the election but specifically to aid Donald J. Trump. The president-elect responded to the news by dismissing the intelligence agency’s conclusions — indeed, by dismissing the intelligence community altogether. Mr. Trump called the findings “ridiculous.” In a statement, his transition office scoffed, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” In response, journalists of good faith snapped into fact-checking mode, familiar from the campaign. ...
Democrats, pundits and reporters put forth the evidence that Russia was behind the hack; Mr. Trump and his allies, even after using the hacked emails to smear Mrs. Clinton, repeat that it is “impossible to know.” The combination creates an extraordinary amount of noise at the expense of understanding.
From this you might think that Gessen is full speed ahead on the side of Russia-done-it. But that’s not the case at all.
If there is one trait that Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia share over all others, it is their understanding of the power of separating facts from truth. By denying known and provable facts — as when Mr. Trump denies making statements he has made — or by rejecting facts that are not publicly known, as with the C.I.A.’s information on Russian hacking, Mr. Trump exercises his ever-growing power over the public sphere. The resulting frenzy of trying to prove either the obvious known facts or the classified and therefore unknowable facts — two fruitless pursuits — creates so much static that we forget what we are really talking about.
I have started thinking of Gessen’s articles as survival guides. And yet, I will be screaming about this story again first thing Monday. Because it’s the best I can do.
Ian Buruma sings the depressing theme song of 2016.
At the end of January, unless something very strange happens, all four major powers in the world will be ruled by authoritarian figures. Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US.
What explains the rise of the strongman, or woman? Why is liberal democracy being tested in so many countries by rightwing demagogues who seem to care very little for the liberal part. Hungary and Poland can no longer be called liberal democracies. Forthcoming elections in France and the Netherlands will show whether an autocratic one-man party (Geert Wilders’s Freedom party), or an illiberal far-right party (Marine Le Pen’s Front National), will cause upsets in western Europe.
It’s sometimes hard to see it, what with one war not even bothering to get out of the way before we start another, and cities being shelled into rubble on the evening news, but we live in a time of peace. That is, organized conflicts of all types, as a cause of human deaths, have been lower over the last 70 years than any equivalent period on the books. Yes, that includes the Korean War. And Vietnam. And a lot of damn messy stuff that Americans mostly overlook that involved people trying to hold onto colonial areas they shouldn’t have had in the first place way after it was clear that packing up and going home was the best option.
At pretty much any other time in history you (and I don’t mean “you, American.” I mean “you, human being living on planet Earth”) stood a better chance of someone in a slightly-different uniform marching into your home town to rape, pillage, and murder than during the period after World War II. Of course, that’s not at all comforting if your home town was Sarajevo, or Mogadishu or Aleppo. Statistics are nothing if not impersonal.
That period of relative peace corresponds to a period of growing power for liberal democracies—a period that may be closing.
Strongmen and populist leaders rely on charisma more than expertise and well-thought-out policies. In times of stress, when large numbers of people fear the future for whatever reason, such leaders offer the same kind of reassurance that religious authority does. Expertise becomes at best an irrelevance and at worst a dirty word.
On a personal level, many of us hate this new era already. Now we see what happens to the statistics.
The New York Times wonders if Trump will keep his word on Social Security.
Donald Trump campaigned on a promise not to cut Social Security, which puts him at odds with the Republican Party’s historical antipathy to the program and the aims of today’s Republican leadership. So it should come as no surprise that congressional Republicans are already testing Mr. Trump’s hands-off pledge.
That’s enough. Trump will give the GOP leadership what it wants. The New York Times will call it a sign of Trump’s “maturing” as a leader and “compromising” with traditional conservatives. Next question.
This piece isn’t on the opinion page, but in my opinion, it gives a glimmer of hope, so it’s worth sharing.
Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes.
… Joyce and the other 305 Republican electors who are supposed to cast their votes for Trump have been subject to intense campaigns orchestrated by anti-Trump forces to convince them that they alone can block the reality-television star from the White House.
Estimates of the number of electors considering a flip away from Trump range from 1 to 25. So the case runs from pretty much hopeless to still extraordinarily difficult … but possible.
The GOP-controlled House could vote for Trump anyway, but those trying to flip voters say there is still value in taking a stand.
And hey, if you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas gift, how about a nice copy of my novel On Whetsday. It’s suitable for readers 8 to 80! Or maybe more like 12 to 120. But if you buy one, you will be making someone’s Christmas very happy. That’ll be me. But the person who gets the book will like it too.