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Sarah Vowell on… hey, did you hear me? It’s Sarah Vowell!
Every August, the oldest synagogue in the United States celebrates the fact that George Washington hated tolerance.
In 1790, a couple of months after Rhode Island became the last state to ratify the Constitution, Moses Seixas of Touro Synagogue in Newport wrote his president a nice note about what a relief it was to live in a republic “deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”
Washington replied to Seixas and his brethren, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Tolerance, he meant, was small, petty and obsolete because they lived in a big new country where citizens stood side by side. For the United States government, he wrote, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” He added, “Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
The absolutely only thing wrong with reading a Sarah Vowell essay in my Sunday paper is that I’m reading it. Because, in the best possible world, Sarah Vowell reads it for me. Everything’s better when Sarah Vowell reads it.
... it’s worth remembering that colonial Rhode Island had attracted so many Jews, Quakers, Baptists and other denominations because non-Puritans were persecuted in neighboring Massachusetts. And that in 1774, the First Continental Congress almost fell apart in its first five minutes because a couple of Episcopalians refused to pray with a bunch of shifty Quakers and Congregationalists.
So it was a civil rights landmark when the first American president publicly invited non-Christians to join him on equal footing on the First Amendment’s front porch. Now, after Khizr Khan appeared on national television offering to lend Donald J. Trump a paperback Constitution he had pulled out of his jacket, thereby turning the pocket Constitution into an Amazon best seller, next Sunday’s annual reading of Washington’s letter at Touro Synagogue is sure to crackle with newsy excitement.
It goes without saying that you should read the rest of Vowell’s article. So … why am I having to say it? Scoot.
When you’re done, join me inside.
Also from Sarah Vowell’s article, because I can’t resist …
It was heartening to read the letter signed by 50 Republican national security officials who announced on Monday, “None of us will vote for Donald Trump.” Among their reasons: “He appears to lack basic knowledge about and belief in the U.S. Constitution.”
One of the signers, who has served in every Republican presidential administration since Nixon’s, stands out as having the most Republican name since Henry Cabot Lodge: William Howard Taft IV. He is the great-grandson of the Republican overachiever who was our 27th president and our 10th chief justice. So while every Republican stalwart on the list has my respect for abandoning their party’s nominee, I would imagine it took extra guts for Mr. Taft to add his family name to the list of mutineers.
Historians. With their … their perspective. And their … history. I demand more of it.
The New York Times on Trump’s outreach to the the itchiest trigger fingers.
The mutual embrace of Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association grew tighter last week with Mr. Trump’s incendiary suggestion that Second Amendment advocates could “maybe” find a way to deal with Hillary Clinton and her gun safety agenda if she reached the White House.
Whether calculated or clumsy, Mr. Trump’s ugly pronouncement left a whiff of lethal intimidation in the air. It marked a singular moment of desperation in his presidential campaign — but also created grounds for the nation to demand a rational, substantive campaign debate on gun safety that gets beyond Mr. Trump’s inflammatory sound bites.
That would be nice … if it were true. But the one thing that didn’t emerge from Trump’s assassination haiku was any discussion of gun control. Plenty of discussions did emerge—most of them having to do with what it means when a presidential candidate takes a break from reality—but massacres of children, people out for a fun evening, or policeman standing up for the first amendment in the best way, haven’t been able to generate a genuine national discussion on guns. Trump’s little incitement to murder barely even registers on the “outrages that should generate discussion of gun control, but don’t” scale.
Nicholas Kristof says Trump is like a fly that keeps landing on your burger; he’s driving us all a little mad.
All across America, in little towns like this one, Donald Trump is mainstreaming hate.
This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”...
“People now feel that it is O.K. to say things that they might not have said a year ago,” she said. “Trump played a big role.”
Donald Trump’s primary theme is that common decency, and what my mother would call “just good manners,” both fall into the category of being “politically correct.” And politically correct is weak. So suddenly jackass = brave.
We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of “e pluribus unum.” He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over we will be struggling to corral it again.
The people who support Donald Trump don’t really want America to be “great.” They’re not interested in seeing America at her best. They just want a country where they can smoke where they want, dump their ashtray in the road, call the teenager scrambling to make their meal at Burger Doodle a “bitch” as loudly as they want, and hate whoever they want, whenever they want. Trump is a role model. Now they all want to be the bully.
Ross Douthat is allowed back on the page. Let’s see for how long.
This election was supposed to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton, long a polarizing figure because she seemed to embody the cultural transformations of the 1960s — the liberal, feminist, working-mother spouse of the first boomer president.
He says all that like those are bad things.
But in the year of Donald Trump, the religious conservatives who fought many of those transformations find themselves reduced to a hapless rump. The best have retreated to rebuild; the worst have abased themselves before a sybaritic, irreligious presidential nominee.
Okay, he stayed long enough get in ‘sybaritic,’ on his way to blaming the Sexual Revolution for producing Donald Trump. That’s enough.
The New York Times visits Sparta, Georgia’s jaw-droppingly unfair election practices.
In Sparta, Ga., last year, white election officials decided to systematically question the registrations of more than 180 voters, mostly African-Americans, by dispatching sheriff’s deputies to flag them down. These voters were served with “courtesy” summonses ordering them to appear in person to prove their residence to officials or lose their voting rights.
In an echo of the Jim Crow South, the black voters described how they were suddenly approached by a uniformed police officer challenging their right to vote. “I was kind of nervous,” one of the voters told Michael Wines of The Times. “I didn’t know what to do.”
This should have ended with the election officials watching the polls through bars, because while “lock her up” isn’t something anyone should chant at a political opponent, “lock them up” is the just decision when officials abuse their power to block a fundamental right. But of course, with the current Supreme Court, the results are sickeningly un-American.
With the Supreme Court having gutted the Voting Rights Act provision that required all voting changes in Georgia to be pre-cleared by federal monitors, black Sparta residents had no option but to file a lawsuit last year challenging the purging of 53 registered voters from the rolls. They accused election officials of scheming to give an edge in municipal elections to a white mayoral candidate, who eventually won by a narrow vote in the 2015 election.
Dan Balz asks the question you might have asked on any given day of the last three weeks: Has Trump hit bottom?
The unraveling of Donald Trump’s candidacy continues apace, a long and steady decline since the high point three months ago. If he were deliberately trying to avoid winning the election, he could hardly be doing a better job.
The hole he has dug for himself is wide and deep. National polls and battleground state polls all tell a similar story. Hillary Clinton has opened up a small-to-significant lead over Trump almost everywhere it counts. Unless Trump can reverse course, Clinton, despite persistent questions about her honesty, is on track to win a handsome electoral college majority. The lone bright spot for Trump: It’s August not October. But that comes with a caveat.
Every time I meet someone, and they learn that I write for a political blog, the first question I get isn’t “who do you support?” or “who do you think is going to win?” The first question, every time, is “do you think Trump is throwing this election?”
And of course, who can tell? In a three hour period this week I wrote stories first about Trump tripling down on calling the president “the founder of ISIS,” then Trump tweeting that it was sarcasm, and then Trump saying that it wasn’t really all that sarcastic. Sometimes—often—I feel that Trump exists just to drive me, personally, nutso. Which is probably some form of narcissism. Or paranoia. Or both. So maybe Trump’s scheme worked!
One thing remains steady for Trump. His core supporters are thoroughly loyal and seemingly enthusiastic. His crowds remain huge. They are also a misleading indicator. The closer Trump gets to Election Day, the more those big crowds will distract him from the reality of the overall campaign. He’s in danger of permanently locking himself into a losing percentage of the electorate.
Alyssa Rosenberg on some American’s showing what’s great about the country.
Through the first week of the Rio Games, it’s been moving to see so much of what’s lately been generating anxieties at home contribute so powerfully to U.S. preeminence on the international stage. If race, gender, immigration and even our definitions of success are dividing us as citizens and voters, they’re uniting us, if only temporarily, as fans of Team USA. …
Reigning world champion Simone Biles, gold medalist in the individual and team all-around competitions, is African American, as is Gabby Douglas, who won gold medals in those events at the 2012 London Olympics.Laurie Hernandez is Puerto Rican, and the team is rounded out by two white gymnasts, Aly Raisman, who is Jewish, and Madison Kocian. ...
Over at the aquatics stadium, a different facet of U.S. achievement has been front and center. Swimmers from a number of countries spoke out against competitors caught using performance-enhancing drugs in the past, with American Lilly King’s condemnation of Russia’s Yulia Efimova attracting particular attention. Episodes of wagged fingers and splashed water have been read as the latest and wettest — if not the coldest — chapter in the fraught relationship between these two nations.
It’s true enough that the only medal I’ve scored is the 100-hour eyeball burn from being unable to look away, but I love these games. Actually, that’s not true; I also have a painful wrist from pounding on the wall in my effort to bring Mara Abbott across that finish line. Mara and I didn’t quite make it, but damn, that was exciting.
James Downie thinks it’s going to be a good election for Democrats, but leave the House in GOP hands.
It’s all coming up aces for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by more than seven percentage points nationally in the poll averages. She is ahead by seven points in New Hampshire, eight in Virginia, nine in Pennsylvania and 11 in Colorado — enough to lock up the electoral college. Polls also look good for the Democrats to retake the Senate, especially because former Indiana senator Evan Bayh decided to run for his old seat.
But not all the news is good. Despite the Democrats having the inside track for the executive branch and the upper chamber of Congress, there seems little chance of a Democratic House.
The blame falls on the DCCC, who both failed to recruit good candidates, and failed to anticipate at least a dozen districts that became competitive with Trump topping the ticket.
A dozen districts, in other words, that might have been in play but can be counted as safe by Republicans. Democrats have a good roster of recruits in the most “flippable” seats, from rising stars such as Morgan Carroll in Colorado’s 6th District to veterans such as Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire’s 1st. But Mike Bost in Illinois’s 12th District and Tom MacArthur in New Jersey’s 3rd are just two of a number of GOP members of Congress who can breathe more easily because Democrats could not find strong opponents for them.
I want everyone to sign a pledge that they’ll campaign twice as hard in 2018 as in 2016. Including Hillary.
David Ignatius is right about the biggest threat to your job. And mine.
Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology.
A look at the numbers suggests that the country is having the wrong economic debate this year. Employment security won’t come from renegotiating trade deals, as Donald Trump said in a speech Monday in Detroit, or rebuilding infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton argued in Warren, Mich., on Thursday. These are palliatives.
You are—we are—about to be replaced by AI. There is no safe sector.
The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and “machine learning” systems.
Automation could very easily be the next step in neo-feudalism, with the 1% who own the robots building the ultimate glass windows against which the rest of us can only press our noses. Or, our whole system has to change. How we do work. How we assign worth. Everything.
One of these things is going to happen. Very soon.
Allen Weiner and Duncan Pickard tell the truth about that $400 million payment to Iran.
The latest victim in the presidential race’s assault on truth — to say nothing of nuance — came last week in the flurry of accusations surrounding the United States’ payment of $400 million to Iran. Donald Trump called it ransom, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) accused the United States of acting like a “drug cartel.” ...
The payment was not a ransom but rather part of a settlement agreement that the United States reached with Iran for claims arising out of the 1979 Iranian revolution, which toppled the pro-American shah and brought the current Islamist government to power. …
The Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, which has equal numbers of American, Iranian and neutral judges, has settled more than $2.5 billion in claims, including many in favor of U.S. nationals. Nearly 35 years on, it continues to be a hallmark of peaceful dispute resolution and has contributed greatly to the development of international law.
Leonard Pitts talks the Baltimore police.
Which brings us to Baltimore and a scathing new Justice Department report on its police department. The government found that the city’s police have a long pattern of harassing African Americans and that oversight and accountability have been virtually nonexistent.
Indeed, the Constitution must have been looking the other way when an officer struck in the face a restrained youth who was in a hospital awaiting mental evaluation, when police arrested people who were doing nothing more sinister than talking on a public sidewalk, when they tasered people who were handcuffed. Not to mention the time a cop strip-searched a teenager on the street as his girlfriend looked on and, after the boy filed a complaint, threw him against a wall and repeated the humiliation, this time cupping his genitals for good measure.
And while you’re reading this Leonard Pitts, which you should, take a peek back to Pitt's equally thoughtful article from Aug 9.
Far be it from me to correct Jesus, but to survey the modern political landscape is to see precious little evidence of the truth setting anyone free. Indeed, it is to become convinced that a great many of us would not know the truth if it bit them on the nose. They prefer the soft comfort of lies to the hard challenge of facts.
Or maybe it’s just sarcasm.
The world is getting harder to believe every day, but if this whole thing ends with some kid looking at a snow globe, I’m going to be really disappointed.