In Ken Burn’s documentary on the Civil War, there’s a quote from historian Barbara Fields that, for me at least, is the heart of the whole piece.
… the Civil War as a historic phenomenon, is not on the battlefield. It's not about weapons; it's not about soldiers. Except to the extent that weapons and soldiers at that crucial moment, joined a discussion about something higher; about humanity, about human dignity, about human freedom.
This election might likewise be seen as a trial with no redeeming value; an ugly experience that has soiled the nation with blatant racism, sexism, and religious bigotry. It might be only a spasm of violence, from the personal to the national. It might, arguably, be both the nation’s darkest hour and most serious threat to it’s continued existence as a republic since the guns were laid down at Appomattox.
But we’ve also been gifted with moments, and voices, that have elevated this discussion.
Michelle Obama may have done the seemingly impossible. She may just have rescued the US elections from the grotesque and demeaning mire into which they have descended. She did something even more remarkable, and just as badly needed. With the touch of a poet, her speech last night shamed the tat and the tawdry of populism and held out the possibility of something better. She lent her extraordinary ability to say what people are feeling to every English-speaking woman in the world.
Michelle Obama’s speech unfurled on all the same levels as the hate and disdain that Trump’s campaign has spread across this contest. And on every rung of that ladder, the First Lady showed that there still is a national conscience—and a personal conscience—along with a will to see an end not just to Trump, but to the kind of toxic masculinity that says power includes the privilege of assault.
Last night she talked of women doing what women have always done “just trying to get through it … trying to pretend this doesn’t really bother us”. She ended: “This is not normal, this is not politics as usual … this has got to stop right now.”
Michelle Obama may have the right to slip from the public limelight after this election. And God knows, she has earned a rest. But please, let her stay close. We need her.
When she speaks, Michelle Obama doesn’t stop being the wife of the president, but she transcends it. She becomes the personification of the best of her country.
Okay, let’s see what the pundits are saying this morning ...
Frank Bruni also crafted a peaen to Michelle Obama.
… isn’t it interesting that after so many years of keeping a studied distance from the ugliness of the political arena, the first lady is throwing herself with such passion into this grotesque campaign?
That says everything about the singular threat that Trump poses, and she’s emerging as the fiercest counter to it: Michelle Obama, octopus slayer. She’s effective because she has never gone looking for a fight — we know that about her. She acts when she has something to defend, and as she made clear in a stirring, searing speech late last week, that’s more than her husband’s legacy, which a Trump victory would decimate. It’s her dignity as a woman. It’s the dignity of all women.
All women is too small a description. All decent people, both in America and elsewhere.
I don’t mean to overstate her impact: Trump was going down before she joined the chorus of condemnation. But her eloquence is sealing the deal. First at the Democratic convention in late July and then in New Hampshire on Thursday, she embodied the nation’s conscience and staked her claim as the most earnest guardian of our most important values.
We’re not supposed to put living people on stamps or coins, but … if we get a Democratic Congress out of this election, they might want to pass a bill making one singular exception.
The Washington Post previously gave it’s un-dorsement of Trump. And now the real deal for Hillary.
In the gloom and ugliness of this political season, one encouraging truth is often overlooked: There is a well-qualified, well-prepared candidate on the ballot. Hillary Clinton has the potential to be an excellent president of the United States, and we endorse her without hesitation.
Very nice, but there’s still a lot of she’s-not-him-ism in this endorsement.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump. But we would also tell you that was our judgment.
Don’t expect a lot of stirring, trumpet-blaring fanfare at this point. The endorsement includes a lot of apologetic “flaws, missteps and weaknesses” discussion. Still, this is one more paper that isn’t going break Trump’s amazing near-enough-infinity to 0 streak.
Michael Cohen begs for an end to the madness.
This take is five days late, but after watching Hillary Clinton at the second presidential debate last Sunday — I am in awe of her. ...
Trump called Clinton a liar. He said she had hate in her heart. He told her that if he were president he’d throw her in jail. He talked about the philandering of her husband Bill Clinton and even brought to the debate hall women who’ve accused him of sexual assault. He lied incessantly, about both his own plans and those of Clinton. He sought to intimidate her by looming over her and standing directly behind her as she answered questions. ...
And yet, somehow, Hillary Clinton maintained her composure. She didn’t get angry; she didn’t get petulant; she didn’t give Trump a richly deserved slap in the face.
Hillary may be able to constrain herself because she doesn’t have to make threats or appoint a Grand Inquisitor to see Trump go to jail. Trump has already taken care of that. Between the evidence available on Trump University, and the series of blatantly illegal actions at the Trump Foundation, orange may soon spread beyond Trump’s face,
It’s all the more reason to scrap next week’s third and final presidential debate. No person should have to be subjected to what Clinton dealt with on Sunday and, more important, no great democratic nation should be subjected to it either.
Count me in. I don’t want to see a minute more. I don’t want to see Hillary facing the decision of whether or not to shake Trump’s (tiny) tentacle. I can do without another of Trump’s discursive nonsense remarks. And I’m willing to bet that Climate Change still won’t get mentioned. Let’s just call it done.
Lois Beckett rejoins one of the most odious fearmongers of the GOP convention, and finds him mongering fear.
It’s “pitchforks and torches time”, a prominent conservative sheriff tweeted on Saturday, with a condemnation of the government and media that echoes the increasingly heated rhetoric of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. ...
Clarke paired what appeared to be an accusation of the corruption in most of the United States government with a photoshopped image of a crowd of people carrying burning sticks and pitchforks.
At the rate that the Trump campaign is adding enemies to its list and ratcheting up the violent rhetoric, we may not make it to election day before they decide to stage their putsch. By now, I kind of wish they’d just get it over with.
Leonard Pitts reminds us that not everything that will define who we are as a nation is waiting until election day.
Meantime, back at Guantanamo …
Chances are you haven’t thought of that American gulag — or, for that matter, of “extraordinary renditions,” CIA black sites and torture — for a long time.
... two New York Times reports documenting how torture, both at Gitmo and at CIA black sites around the world, destroyed the mental health of numerous detainees, many of whom turned out to be innocent of terrorism. Reporters James Risen, Matt Apuzzo and Sheri Fink introduce us to men who were slammed into walls and had foreign objects shoved into their rectums, who were beaten, kept awake, housed in never-ending darkness or light, forced into stress positions, subjected to nonstop music at ear-splitting levels, injected with drugs, menaced by dogs, locked in boxes the size of coffins and laid out shackled and nude on tarps as gallons of ice cold water were poured down on them to simulate drowning. One prisoner described being used as a human mop, dragged through his own urine.
There is nothing these men might have done that would make this acceptable. Nothing. Not if they were both Bin Laden’s bomb makers and Jeffery Dahmer’s sous chef. You know that old parental saw “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you?” Well … you’re parents were lying. But this is true of Guantanamo. It harms America far more than any of the men it confines.
Guantanamo isn’t just a symbol of America’s unwillingness to obey our own laws, it’s an international emblem of chickenshit cowardice.
Carl Hiaasen asks that you don’t decide to play games with your vote.
A fellow named Gary Johnson is running for president on the Libertarian ticket. He is an affable flake with zero chance of winning, yet millions of disenchanted Americans are expected to vote for him this year. ...
Yet even after all the rancid revelations of the past 10 days, the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton remains close enough in a few key states that Johnson is potentially a spoiler. We’ve been down this path before, with crushing consequences.
One year—maybe soon if the Republican Party genuinely completes its disassembly under Trump—a third party will come along whose views conform to those of a significant number of Americans and whose candidates demonstrate the knowledge and experience worthy of the offices they seek. That’s not this year.
Forget the hanging chads, disputed recounts and lawsuits. Here’s the true reason that Gore lost Florida, and the election:
More than 138,000 voters in the Sunshine State cast their ballots in that election for third-party candidates. Most of them you never heard of, before or since.
The Iraq War and everything that came after. Plus accelerating climate change, tax cuts for the wealthy that drove up debt for everyone else … really, it’s hard to even think about what the world would have been like, had a few voters in Florida not tried to be so damn cute.
Normal Leahy thanks Trump’s slinking away from Virginia might be the first ripple in a wave.
News that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is pulling his already-limited campaign presence from Virginia makes it clear he will not be the next president.
The only question remaining is whether Trump’s implosion indicates a wave election is on the horizon.
Though Trump’s presidential hopes are turning into third-rate Trump champagne nightmares, at the moment numbers for Republican Congressmen aren’t souring along with Trump. But then, Trump’s “scorched earth” tactics are about making people stay home. You hear that, Republicans?
Ruth Marcus tells a sadly-familiar story.
The arm went around my shoulder. Then the hand began to creep, farther and farther, down the neckline of my dress. I was 20, at a fancy dinner for my college newspaper. The hand belonged to a grown-up — make that supposedly grown-up — editor. An editor from whom I wanted a summer job. …
Now, 38 years later, it feels more humiliating than it did back then. I am embarrassed by the meek complicity of my younger self, shamed to the point of being wary of revealing it to my daughters, now college students themselves. I like to believe they would not sit still, literally, for such treatment.
I was alarmed to realize, as I watched some classic movies this week, how many involved “stealing a kiss” or how often the first “romantic” move by the leading man involved grabbing a woman who was either angry or walking away to pull her back for an aggressive lip-lock. What bothered me most… that it hadn’t bothered me more, and earlier.
Peggy Orenstein and young men who don’t think they’re Trumps … they just don’t think.
Lately, I have begun interviewing young men about their attitudes toward sexuality. Most are not mini-Trumps in the making. Instead, they, too, express confusion, uncertainty: eager to fit in, yet troubled by assumptions and expectations of masculinity. Many are girls’ staunchest allies — or would like to be. One 19-year-old in Northern California, for instance, told me he’d spent the summer working at a bicycle shop. The all-guy staff whiled away their days talking in what he described as “incredibly degrading ways” about girls. At the printable end of the spectrum, they referred to the cafe down the street, which was entirely staffed by young women, as “the Bitches.” As in, “Hey, you want to go grab coffee from the Bitches?”
Unfortunately, while fitting into this environment might not involve Trump’s presumption of ownership, at least in this case it took a good swerve toward the go-along servility of Billy Bush.
He didn’t participate in such “locker room talk,” but neither did he challenge it. “I was just there for the summer,” he said. “So I put my head down and did my job.”
And that’s not enough. Not by any measure.
“Don’t sexually assault women” (or, for that matter, “Don’t get a girl pregnant”) is an awfully low bar for acceptable behavior. It does little to address the complexity of boys’ lives, the presumption of their always-down-for-it sexuality, the threat of being called a “pussy” if you won’t grab one, the collusion that comes with keeping quiet. Boys need continuing, serious guidance about sexual ethics, reciprocity, respect. Rather than silence or swagger, they need models of masculinity that are not grounded in domination or aggression.
And finally, this is why sluggo has the top spot on the page.
… perhaps the most eloquent condemnation of Trump came from one of the houses of state parliament in New South Wales, which, according to BuzzFeed Australia, just passed a unanimous motion to declare Donald Trump a "revolting slug." The motion—a symbolic declaration of sorts with no real legislative heft—was tendered by a member of the Greens Party:
"I move that this house condemns the misogynistic, hateful comments made by…Mr Donald Trump, about women and minorities, including the remarks revealed over the weekend that clearly describe sexual assault…and agrees with those who have described Mr Trump as 'a revolting slug' unfit for public office," the motion read.
It’s unfair really. I quite like slugs.