As you might expect, there are two themes that dominate the pundits this morning: how did Donald Trump get past the barricades into our extremely serious political system, and how a home made "documentary" that contains snippets of conversations collected over three years has generated a synthetic crisis concerning Planned Parenthood. Also has you might expect—no one has drawn a connection between these two items.
But before we get to those Very Important Issues, here's a history lesson from Leonard Pitts.
He wanted to start a race war.
That, you will recall, was what authorities say white supremacist Dylann Roof had in mind when he shot up a storied African-American church in June. It might have surprised him to learn that we’ve already had a race war.
No, that’s not how one typically thinks of World War II, but it takes only a cursory consideration of that war’s causes and effects to make the case. Germany killed 6 million Jews and rampaged through Poland and the Soviet Union because it considered Jews and Slavs subhuman. The Japanese stormed through China and other Asian outposts in the conviction that they were a superior people and that Americans, as a decadent and mongrel people, could do nothing about it.
Meantime, this country was busy imprisoning 120,000 of its citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps and plunging into a war against racial hatred with a Jim Crow military. The American war effort was undermined repeatedly by race riots — whites attacking blacks at a shipyard in Mobile, white servicemen beating up Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, to name two examples.
While we're quick to point up religion as a source of tension leading to war (Radical Muslims!), we're not always as open to the idea that wars have been driven by race, and by our twisted notions of what constitutes "race" and "purity."
The world has seen plenty of race wars — meaning tribalistic violence —before and since 1945. Ask the Armenians, the Tutsis, the Darfurians. Ask the Congolese, the Cambodians, the Herero. Ask the Cherokee. The childish human urge to divide itself and destroy itself has splashed oceans of blood across the history of the world.
Maybe that bit of human nature that wants to divide and divide and divide until everyone sits in a nation of one will win out over the urge to join together, to be a part of something bigger, to unite in community and cause. Or maybe the tension between these two forces will continue to play out along lines of religion, and race, and culture, and anything else we can think of. You'd like to think that things can't go on like this, but so far so... (sigh).
Come on in! See the amazing Donald and how he has nothing to do with the other stories of the day...
Patrick Healy on the difference between political theater and... political theater.
How fitting that the Republican presidential candidates will hold their first debate this Thursday on the same night as the Broadway opening of “Hamilton,” the groundbreaking new musical about the founding fathers. At a time when so many American politicians are sanitized, cautious, even boring, the characters on the debate stage and the Broadway stage are remarkably in sync: brazen, unpredictable, even outrageous. ...
Mr. Trump, having rocketed to the top of opinion polls after insulting immigrants (Mexicans, especially) and veterans (John McCain, specifically), will dominate the spotlight at the Cleveland debate no matter whether he’s caustic or — surprise! — cool and civil. People just want to see what a scene stealer does next. ...
The sacrifices of immigrants and veterans are in a spotlight of their own in “Hamilton,” which deconstructs America’s birth by portraying the founders as far more than the Great White Men of History. ...
“Immigrants!” says Lafayette, the French ally of the colonists, to his friend Hamilton before the Battle of Yorktown.
“We get the job done!” the two men exclaim, complete with a high-five.
Hamilton, I'm not in a hurry to peel away from my money. Jackson, on the other hand...
Frank Bruni on how a nice country like us ended up with a guy like Mr. Trump.
Where did we go wrong?
Was it in 1962, when Marilyn Monroe sidled onto a stage in what could have been mistaken for lingerie and warbled “Happy Birthday” to John Kennedy, ...
Was it six years later, when Richard Nixon, trying to soften his image, made an appearance on the television program “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”?
Or was it about a quarter century after that, when Bill Clinton played saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” ...
I’m not sure. But of this I’m certain: We now utterly conflate entertainment and politics, routinely confuse celebrity with authority and regularly lose sight of the difference between a cult of personality and a claim to leadership.
And Donald Trump — still going strong, still dominating the polls — is the emblem, apotheosis and ripe, fleshy, orange-crowned fruit of this. (Yes, Donald, I called you a fruit. Deal with it.)
Bruni goes on at length about the way in which we've blurred the political / entertainment boundary, but no, no, and NO. It wasn't this kind of political crossover that generated The Donald. Trump has nothing do do with how many times Obama shook hands with Leno. It was that other kind: talk radio and it's video incarnation, Fox News. It was the decades of the-more-outrageous-the-story-the-more-you-must-believe-it that made Trump something that Republicans could take as a Serious Candidate. Trump did not get invited to the stage by a cooing Marilyn Monroe. He was propelled into the stage on puffs of Limbaugh's Oxycontin-scented breath whipped into a high-haired tornado by O'Reilly's ludicrous No Spin Zone and a chorus of hand-wringing blondes.
Ross Douthat shall now relate how good Trump is for Jeb Bush.
...what matters most, politically, about the “I Am Trump” spectacle isn’t what the Donald does but whom he helps. Trump won’t be the Republican nominee, but the eventual nominee may end up owing him a debt of gratitude for services rendered along the way.
For now, it’s easiest to see who will owe Trump their resentment, since just about every dark-horse candidate has been effectively bigfooted by the Donald. His rise has knocked past limelighters like Rand Paul and Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee downward in the polls, and put a comb-over-shaped lid on the hopes of Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum and Carly Fiorina. ...
But among Trump’s potential beneficiaries, the man most likely to be indebted is Jeb Bush. ... Walker and Rubio are still there, and Jeb’s weaknesses remain. But Trump has come bearing the former Florida governor several gifts.
Douthat's theory is that Trump is allowing Bush to lay low, hoarding his cash and being inoffensive, until the moment when Jeb! Attacks! Which will surely be any day now. Any day. Just any day. He's basically waiting for Donald to play whack-a-candidate with the rest until Trump fatigue sets in. Which... seems like a very strange system of selecting a candidate. Though I have to say I do like "bigfooted" as a verb. It certainly tops Douthat's usual tendency to dig through old Buckley columns for a suitably erudite term.
The New York Times looks at Republican reactions to the Iran agreement.
The exaggerations and half-truths that some Republicans are using to derail President Obama‘s important and necessary nuclear deal with Iran are beyond ugly. Invoking the Holocaust, Mike Huckabee, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has accused Mr. Obama of marching Israelis “to the door of the oven.” Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, has compared Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped negotiate the deal, to Pontius Pilate.
What should be a thoughtful debate has been turned into a vicious battle against Mr. Obama, involving not just the Republicans but Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The unseemly spectacle of lawmakers siding with a foreign leader against their own commander in chief has widened an already dangerous breach between two old allies.
Policy considerations aside, what is most striking about the demagoguery is how ahistorical, if not downright hypocritical, it is. Negotiating with adversaries to advance a more stable world has long been a necessity, and Republican presidents have been among its most eager practitioners.
The
Times board goes on to give several good examples of Republican presidents negotiating with far more dangerous opponents than Iran. But the first two paragraphs are all you need to see. It's not that Donald Trump is turning the Republican Party into a clown show. It's that the Republican Party has become such a clown show, that Donald Trump slides right in. In fact, you can make a very good case that Donald Trump's comments are
far less harmful to our nation than those being expressed by people who already have terms like "Congressman" and "Senator" before their names.
Nicholas Kristof on how our Republican dominated Congress is more fixated on sex than a teenager on Prom night.
To appreciate the dumbing down of American politics, consider this: Conservative Republicans, indignant about abortion, are trying to destroy a government program that helps prevent 345,000 abortions a year.
Inevitably in politics there are good ideas and bad ideas. But occasionally there are also moronic ideas — such as the House Republican proposal to kill America’s main family planning program, Title X.
The upshot would be more pregnancies, more abortions, more AIDS, more sexually transmitted infections and more women dying of cervical and breast cancer. Ending the program would impoverish young mothers and impede the formation of stable two-parent families that conservatives rightly argue help overcome poverty. ,,,
The Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health, calculates that Title X family planning centers prevent about one million unintended pregnancies a year, of which 345,000 would have ended in abortion. It says that every year Title X clinics avert some 53,000 cases of chlamydia and 8,800 cases of gonorrhea, and save the lives of 1,100 women who would otherwise die of cervical cancer.
In other words, Title X prevents an abortion about once every 90 seconds.
The reason Republicans are attacking Title X is simple enough. For them, abortion has never been an issue. It's AN ISSUE. It's not about babies, after all, it's about (sotto voce) S-E-X. Any program that helps women with... women things, is something, something, somehow a Very Serious Threat that women should fail in their defined role as the guardians of virtue. After all, how many little girls out there are thinking right now "well, I would be a total sex-crazed slut if only there was someone standing by with federal funds to help me not catch chlamydia." Se... (ahem) S-E-X should be scary. And is something that should be reserved to old male Congressmen who have the money to pay for it.
Dana Milbank on the more visible part of the anti-sex crusade.
Senate Republicans this week, teeming with righteous indignation, introduced S. 1881, “a bill to prohibit federal funding of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”
Here’s a better name for it: the Abortion Promotion Act of 2015.
No doubt the authors of the legislation think that anything that hurts Planned Parenthood, the leading provider of abortions, would further the pro-life cause. But their proposal — defunding all Planned Parenthood operations in retribution for secret videos showing the group’s officials discussing the sale of fetal organs — would do far greater harm to fetuses than anything discussed in the videos.
There already is a ban on federal funding of abortion, with rare exceptions, at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else. The federal funds Senate Republicans propose taking away from Planned Parenthood are used largely to provide women with birth control. And because there simply isn’t a network of health-care providers capable of taking over this job if Planned Parenthood were denied funding, this means hundreds of thousands of women, if not millions, would over time lose access to birth control.
The mistake Milbank makes? Assuming that Republicans don't already know this. Of course the understand that Planned Parenthood is the primary provider for millions of women.
That's their problem with it.
Kathleen Parker is of course here to tell you just how totally reasonable the "strip all funding from Planned Parenthood" bills really are.
...a Senate bill to defund Planned Parenthood, co-authored by Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), stipulates that all of its public funding be reallocated to federally qualified community health centers, which provide all women’s health-care services except abortion, without regard to a person’s ability to pay.
In other words, Planned Parenthood would still be able to provide abortions, since no federal funding can legally be used for abortion, anyway. And abortion opponents would no longer have to worry that their tax money was going to an abortion provider, even though the funds can’t legally be used for abortion.
See? if they take all the money from Planned Parenthood, and leave them with nothing to do but abortions, Republicans will have generated the monster they always said was out there. Win! And it's a great lesson to anyone else who offers women a choice: provide any services we don't like, such as abortions, Plan B, birth control pills, and... hmm, we'll think of more later, and no funds for you. Win-win!
Ruth Marcus also pitches in... on Parker's side.
Even for those who support abortion rights, there is a stomach-churning aspect to the surreptitiously taped conversations with Planned Parenthood officials — the coldblooded discussion, between bites of salad and sips of red wine, of “less crunchy” techniques to obtain specimens, and the precise placement of “graspers” to avoid having to “crush” a valuable body part. ...
That response is, of course, what the antiabortion activists who posed as purchasers and prodded the officials into discussions of payment were counting on. The ensuing uproar, which is taking the congressional form of a clamor to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding, was predictable.
Of course it's disturbing. Any surgical procedure is disturbing, and the bluntness with which doctors discuss medical procedures which are shocking to most, but with which they deal every day, is also disturbing. And no one, No One, NO ONE wants to get an abortion. It's a last option, and always difficult for those involved. But "gee, that makes me queasy" is a rotten way to make policy decisions. That the Planned Parenthood manufactured crisis so dominated the Washington Post tells you just how receptive the conservative media is to conservative docugandas. Why, someone is likely to become a Very Serious Journalist out of this. Just like Breitbart.