This week, the punditry breaks into three broad topics: the upcoming climate conference in Paris, the war in Syria, and (you knew it was coming) Donald Trump.
First, let’s look into the future of our planet and where we’re steering it.
Curt Stager isn’t looking at a crystal ball, just the smoggy facts.
It’s a mistake to think the climatic effects of our carbon emissions will be over within a few decades or centuries. Our intergenerational responsibilities run much deeper into the future.
In this new Anthropocene epoch, the “Age of Humans,” we have become so numerous, our technology so powerful, and our lives so interconnected that we are now a force of nature on a geological scale. By running our civilization on fossil fuels, we are both creating and destroying climates that our descendants will live in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years from now.
Ready for one of the most astounding things you’ve ever read about global warming? Here it comes.
Research by the University of Chicago oceanographer and climate scientist David Archer and others shows that the cleanup will take tens of thousands of years even if we switch quickly to renewable energy sources. When the Earth’s slow cyclic tilting and wobbling along its eccentric orbital path once again leads to a major cooling period some 50,000 years from now, enough of our heat-trapping carbon emissions will still remain in the atmosphere to warm the planet just enough to weaken that chill. In other words, our impacts on global climate are so profound that we will have canceled the next ice age.
I’m sorry, Earth. I’m sorry, animals. I’m sorry, plants. I’m sorry, great-great-great-…-great grandchildren.
Come on in. There’s more pundits… and I think I still have a slice or two of pie. Left over turkey, anyone?
The New York Times has a list of must-haves from the Paris climate conference.
On Monday, in Paris, the signatories to the Rio treaty (now 196), will try once again to fashion an international climate change agreement that might actually slow, then reduce, emissions and prevent the world from tipping over into full-scale catastrophe late in this century. …
Paris will almost certainly not produce an ironclad, planet-saving agreement in two weeks. But it can succeed in an important way that earlier meetings have not — by fostering collective responsibility, a strong sense among countries large and small, rich and poor, that all must play a part in finding a global solution to a global problem.
If that’s all we get from Paris, it will really be a disaster.
Hey, and speaking of disasters!
Mitch McConnell is here to tell you that President Obama is going to go to Paris and talk about, gasp, reducing carbon emissions. In front of other people!
It would obviously be irresponsible for an outgoing president to purport to sign the American people up to international commitments based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, that Congress has voted to reject and that his successor could do away with in a few months’ time.
Yup. No president can ever do anything on the international stage, because… that would be bad. Except for Republican presidents. Who can do things like sign a treaty on Iraq promising what we’d do with our forces, three weeks before vacating the White House. That’s okay.
Ross Douthat knows that Generalissimo Franco is still dead. I think.
Between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War condensed the awful drama of the 1930s into one conflict. Spain was where left-wing illusions about Stalinism went to die, where Hitler’s war machine tuned up for the Blitzkrieg, where aerial bombardments of civilians and politically-motivated “cleansing” were normalized. It was a proxy war for the totalitarian powers, a magnet for volunteers from around the Western world, and an object lesson in the impotence of Europe’s liberal democracies.
As with Spain, so now with Syria.
Spain then is just like Syria now except, of course, for… well, everything. There are about as many parallels between Spain in the 1930s and Syria today as there are between a bulldog and a bullfinch, but let’s get on with the bull.
If the war in Spain demonstrated that Hitler and Stalin were happy to step in when a liberal center failed to hold, the war in Syria demonstrates that the Pax Americana is cracking and no power or alliance is remotely prepared to take its place.
What the war in Syria demonstrates is that if your idea of pax involves creating bellum in several countries at once, and spending one hell of a lot of aeris and injuria in the process, then eventually everyone, including you, is going to tire of spreading this brutal “peace.”
Colbert King sees Syria as the end of something other than America’s questionable role as global beat cop.
“They all laughed when President Obama warned Russia about getting into a Syrian quagmire. …
Of course what’s happening to nuclear-armed Moscow is no laughing matter.
Mired in an economic crisis at home, Russia is enmeshed in propping up a weak but vicious Middle East ally, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. And the Kremlin is straining to keep Assad in power and at considerable and unexpected costs. Russians are going home in body bags. …
Coffins highlight the costs of Putin’s unilateral and reckless military intervention in the Middle East where tensions are now at their highest.
Syria’s place as Putin’s latest distraction from a crashing oil-dependent economy and a lack of progress at home seems to be wearing a bit thin.
The Russian bear has been wounded. But his thirst for adventurism is not yet slaked by the Islamic State’s setbacks and military blunders. Fortunately the means to becoming a superpower equal to the United States are way beyond Russia’s reach.
Let’s just hope that people get tired of Putin quickly, before he decides that what his ego and ratings need is a really big fight.
McKay Coppins on how Donald brought just the right kind of crazy for the crazies on the right.
Early one evening in January 2014, I sat in a darkened den with walnut-paneled walls and baroque furniture, trying desperately to get Donald Trump to stop telling me about his Barack Obama conspiracy theories. “And to this day,” my billionaire host bellowed, “we haven’t seen those records!”
Our interview had started out fine, but now Trump kept veering off on long, excited tangents about forged birth certificates and presidential coverups. No matter what questions I asked, I couldn’t get him off the subject. “We have seen a book of [Obama’s] as a young man that said he was from Kenya, okay?” Trump said, connecting the dots for me like a crazy uncle who has cornered his nephew at Thanksgiving dinner. “The publisher of the book said at first, ‘Well, that’s what he told us.’ But then they said, ‘No, that was a typographical error.’ . . . I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure it was right.” …
Trump’s dominance in this year’s presidential primary race has often been described as a mysterious natural phenomenon: the Donald riding a wild, unpredictable tsunami of conservative populist anger that just now happens to be crashing down on the Republican establishment. But in fact, Trump spent years methodically building and buying support for himself in a vast, right-wing counter-establishment — one that exists entirely outside the old party infrastructure and is quickly becoming just as powerful.
Coppins article has plenty of interesting things to say about Donald and about the GOP right. However, it’s also full of some statements that seem a bit out of kilter—such as the idea that the “the left-wing Web teemed with crazed speculation that the White House had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks” during George W’s administration. Not only was there little such speculation on any left-leaning blog that I visited, most of the sites where this kind of conspiracy theory was de rigueur were far from left wing.
Danielle Allen says Trump has already picked out the drapes. And probably new carpet. Something classy.
If you’re contemplating voting for Trump, you have to imagine something like the “Hollywood” sign hanging over the White House but this one will read “TRUMP.”
The shenanigan king of casino land has a genius for one thing only: branding things with one word slogans. “Loser.” “Moron.” “Trump.” He attributes the bulk of his wealth to the brand of his name, and Forbes confirms that he’s prospered through his casino corporate bankruptcies because it would have been too costly for his creditors to rebrand the gambling houses. Of his many corporate bankruptcies, he says, “Basically I’ve used the laws of the country to my advantage and to other people’s advantage.”
Think about it. Acquiring the White House is the best possible business strategy for the real estate mogul. Consider how unassailable his brand would be then. ...
Imagine the deals the shenanigan king would be able to line up to take advantage of after he leaves office. Imagine how much he’s marking up his net assets right now just because of the free PR of this campaign.
Those of us living in the Trumpublic of Trumpistan will have to use Trump at least once in every sentence. Kind of like Smurf. But gold, baby, solid gold. Trumpy.
Kathleen Parker on how Trump sounds the “mean” whistle,
Donald Trump, insulter extraordinaire, was bound to cross a line too far. Two days before Thanksgiving, he made many people feel nostalgic for the merely obnoxious Trump when he mocked a reporter with a physical disability, displaying a level of cruelty and meanness heretofore only suspected. ...
Trump’s display was reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh’s similar mockery of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease. Like Limbaugh, who accused the actor of exaggerating his symptoms for effect (yeah, playing Parkinson’s is tons of fun), Trump has argued that Kovaleski, who writes for the New York Times, is using his affliction to grandstand. ...
It is hard for many, including yours truly, to fathom Trump’s success as a presidential candidate. What sort of people abide — even applaud — a man with such a gargantuan ego whose sole accomplishment is having made a bundle of money with lots of help from strategic bankruptcies and a rather lavish loan from his father? …
He’s the ultimate personification of a variety of vices (greed, intemperance, gluttony, wrath, pride) that we have embraced as a culture with the certitude of the forgiven — or of the be-damned, anyway.
I think that where Kathleen said “culture” she really meant “Republican Party.” Four decades of preaching greed is good, pride is good, wrath is good, intemperance is good is likely to get you someone who’s greedy, egotistical, mean, and inconsiderate. Just what you ordered.
Leonard Pitts agrees with me. Or I agree with him. Anyway, we agree on this.
Over the course of just two days last weekend, Donald Trump spewed bigotry, venom and absurdity like a sewer pipe, spewed it with such utter disregard for decency and factuality that it was difficult to know what to criticize first.
Shall we condemn him for retweeting a racist graphic on Sunday filled with wildly inaccurate statistics from a non-existent source (“Whites killed by blacks — 81 percent”)?
Or shall we hammer him for tacitly encouraging violence when an African-American protester was beaten up at a Trump rally in Birmingham on Saturday? “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump told Fox “News.”
I’m skipping several points of Trumpery here, because in just two days, Trump committed enough asshattery that to list it all would exceed fair use.
Trump is a whack-a-mole of the asinine and the repugnant. …
Keeping the customer satisfied, giving the people what they want, is the fundament of sound business. More effectively than anyone in recent memory, Trump has transferred that principle to politics. Problem is, it turns out that what a large portion of the Republican faithful wants is racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, the validation of unrealistic fears and the promise of quick fixes to complex problems.
There you go, Kathleen. Just substitute that last sentence for your “culture” comment.
The Miami Herald notes that Paul Ryan apparently thinks his new job is part time work.
To judge from next year’s schedule, members of Congress aren’t even bothering to pretend that they’re doing their jobs. The Senate plans to spend no more than 143 days at work in 2016, and the House calendar is even sleepier: only 111 days in session, roughly two days a week. ...
Immigration reform? Why bother? Much better to attack the president and file lawsuits than to pass a law that might do some good. Even though it’s a hot-button issue and all sides agree that the current law is inadequate, Congress is unlikely to act next year. Or even try.
The attacks in Paris have suddenly brought renewed attention to the increased risk posed by terrorists based in the Middle East. But don’t look for Congress to finally take up President Obama’s request for new war-powers authorizations to wage the fight against the Islamic State, which he issued in February. It’s been consigned to the legislative equivalent of sleeping with the fishes. Much better to rant and rail about the president’s foreign policy than to actually vote up or down on his plan to fight ISIS.
I’ll make a bet with you. During today’s round of Sunday talk, when Republicans rant about Obama not being tough enough on ISIS, no one will bring up this tabled legislation. If I’m wrong, this last slice of pecan pie is yours. And I like pecan pie (but I do have sweet potato as a back up, just in case).
For a full size version of the image at the top of the diary, visit Compound Interest. Thanks.