Thomas Countryman is not a pundit. He’s not anything at the moment, other than a citizen, husband, and father. However, until this week he was the Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, a position he held after serving the United States for 35 years. In that role, it was Countryman who was tasked with keeping WMDs from reaching terrorists, and restricting the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. That critical position is now vacant.
Thomas Countryman speaking on the day of his forced retirement.
Our work is little understood by our fellow Americans, a fact that is sometimes exploited for political purpose. When I have the opportunity to speak to audiences across this amazing land, I explain “We do not have a Department of State – we do not have a foreign policy – because we love foreigners. We do it because we love Americans.” …
We want Americans to sleep the sleep of the righteous, knowing that the smallest fraction of their tax dollar goes to ease poverty and reduce injustice. We want them to know that our consular officers are the first of many lines of defense against those who would come to the US with evil purpose. We want the families of America’s heroes – our servicemen – to know that their loved ones are not put into danger simply because of a failure to pursue non-military solutions. ...
Business made America great, as it always has been, and business leaders are among our most important partners. But let’s be clear, despite the similarities. A dog is not a cat. Baseball is not football. And diplomacy is not a business. Human rights are not a business. And democracy is, most assuredly, not a business.
Seriously, if this much of the speech hasn’t convinced you to go read the rest of it, you need another cup of coffee. I’ll put down the end for you, because I love it, but you need to click that link and read it all.
I leave you with one last thought, from one of my favorite philosophers. If you’ve never read him, or not for many years, I urge you to take the time now. His name is: ….Winnie the Pooh.
And he said:
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
Thank You and God Bless You!
That’s just one. One of the people whose service Donald Trump discarded this week. You can find more analysis of Countryman’s speech at Foreign Policy, but the link above will give you the full text.
Honestly, I’m doubting anything else this week is going to match up. But let’s go see…
Leonard Pitts on taking off the gloves.
I have never been more embarrassed for this country.
Under the rubric of protecting Americans from terrorism, the Trump regime last week banned travel into the United States by people from seven majority-Muslim nations. And never mind that experts, including the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, say the combined U.S. death toll in terrorist attacks from citizens of those nations is zero since 1975.
Just yesterday Mike Pence again made a statement that Trump’s ban is justified because “our administration is going to put the safety and security of the American people first.” Why does anyone believe that’s an acceptable policy? That’s not the oath the president takes. Or the vice-president. Or any soldier in the military. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of that oath. What they all declare their willingness to protect isn’t American jobs, or American companies, or even American lives. It’s the American Constitution. It’s the principles and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution they’re all sworn to uphold at any cost, even if that cost includes American lives. That’s the deal. That’s the oath. That’s the only point on which I feel comfortable in saying “If you don’t like it, find another country.” Substituting the idea of “safety and security” for that fundamental agreement is such a perversion, that I’m always shocked when anyone says it in public.
Sorry, Leonard. That was a long interruption.
The one heartening thing in this is that the detentions sparked such a great outcry, with mass protests erupting at airports across the country. Taken in conjunction with the Women’s March that brought huge numbers to Washington a week and a half ago and inspired echoes across the country and around the world, it seems not unreasonable to hope that we are seeing the birth of a mass movement here.
It’s easy to either blow out of proportion, or belittle, any single event. But I think there’s been a sea change in this country. I don’t think we’re going back.
Charles Sykes personally contributed to the devaluing of facts.
As Americans grapple with the unreality of the new administration, George Orwell’s “1984” has enjoyed a resurgence of interest, becoming a surprise best seller and an invaluable guide to our post-factual world. ...
Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.
And yet, a good percentage of the time the press still seems to think they’re just one complimentary article away from being on Trump’s good side. From being in a position where he throws an arm around them and whispers sweet exclusives in their ear.
For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.
In other words — “Man who created leopards eating faces society shocked to find his own face eaten.”
All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
Yes, well. Thanks for all that effort in laying the groundwork. Here’s your reward.
Ted Koppel has quite a nice piece on the history of the White House relationship with the press and how it relates to actions under Trump.
It sounds dangerously undemocratic to argue against broadening the scope of the White House press corps. But we are already knee-deep in an environment that permits, indeed encourages, the viral distribution of pure nonsense. It does not help that so many in the media establishment have allowed themselves to be goaded into an uninterrupted torrent of quivering outrage. Roughly half the country already questions the motives, intentions and goodwill of the other half. We are increasingly inclined to consume only the product of those news outlets that resonate with our own biases. Whatever is put forward by one side is instinctively rejected by the other.
The only appropriate response is an even greater emphasis on professional standards; factual reporting, multiple sourcing and careful editing. Our system of government depends on nothing so much as the widespread availability of credible, reliable reporting of important events. Rarely in the nation’s history has there been a greater need for objective journalism that voters and legislators alike can use to form judgments and make decisions.
If Koppel’s solution seems a little less than forceful, his history of the proto-Trumpian Nixon press relationships is fascinating.
Frank Bruni and the only subject that matters to Donald Trump.
So what was his demeanor on Wednesday, when he marked Black History Month by sitting down with a handful of black leaders (supporters, really) in the Roosevelt Room? Did he ramp up the courtesy? Tamp down the self-congratulation? Go out of his way to emphasize that he’d be a president for all and that he fully appreciated the struggles and hardships of black Americans over time?
Not so much.
But he did talk about his struggles. His hardships. He couldn’t mention Martin Luther King Jr. without flashing on the King bust in the Oval Office, noting that there had been an erroneous report of its removal and lamenting what he sees as his terrible victimization by biased journalists and “fake news.”
What’s he thinking about at the National Prayer Breakfast? How much better his ratings are than Ahhhnold’s. What’s he thinking morning, noon, and night — how all those stars, planets and moons orbit just one thing.
There’s no topic that Trump can’t bring back around to himself, no cause as compelling as his own. And while I and many others have examined his outsize egomania before, its migration into his administration can’t be noted too often or overstated. …
By the time he got to his inauguration, his masturbatory reveries had morphed into the claim that he was the helmsman of “a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen.” The Bolsheviks might quibble, and I might point out that only 77,000 ballots in three states gave him that Electoral College win, in contrast to the nearly three million ballots by which he lost the popular vote.
Ruth Marcus issues a plea to one of the most important men in the world.
This is a column on a subject of broad public interest but with a single reader in mind: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Justice Kennedy, if you’re reading this, my message is simple: Please don’t retire. It could put your legacy at risk; even more, it would be terrible for the country at a moment that demands healing, not another bitter fight ripping at the seams of national unity.
Note that Kennedy was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, supposed saint of all things GOP. But the Republican Party has since metastasized into something that barely accepts a Scalia-style “how did they spell that in 1792?” approach, much less a judge who stops to think about how the rules should be applied today.
Even if there is no going back in the arena of gay rights, there are issues bound to make their way to the court. Can employers discriminate against workers on the basis of sexual orientation? Can landlords refuse to rent to gay or lesbian tenants? How should the law treat transgender citizens? How should courts balance gay rights against claims of religious freedom or invasions of the right to privacy?
If they can get Gorsuch on the court, you can bet Republicans will make sure that cases back to Cain v. Abel get a review. If Kennedy resigns and Trump places two people on the court, the odds of a free election in 2020 drop by half. And I already have those odds at 50-50.
Kathleen Parker has had a string of weeks in which she made sense, but you knew it couldn’t last. Her column this week is devoted to explaining that Gorsuch is just great and that “It’s the next seat for which Democrats should save their fire, lest they be viewed as intractable as the Republicans were the past eight years.” Because, you know that hurt the Republicans so much.
Next.
Linda Greenhouse wonders if the Supreme Court will rein in the American Caligula.
President Trump’s hyperactive first days in office, along with the evidence that the two Republican-controlled houses of Congress will do the president’s bidding with few questions asked, leaves the judiciary as the only branch of government standing between the new administration and constitutional chaos. Consider what would have happened last weekend had half a dozen federal judges not stepped in to prevent the immediate ouster from the country of legal permanent residents and carefully vetted refugees and visa holders.
All the Republicans who say both that they’re “strict Constitutionalists” and that they hate it when “judges make law,” may well find that you can’t have both. Though putting Mr. Fascism Forever on the Court would seem a good way to make Trump’s dictates slide right on through.
To the extent that the presidential campaign focused on the Supreme Court with any specificity, the attention was on abortion, religion, gay rights, guns and other familiar issues on the social agenda. But going forward, the Roberts court may find the most pressing issues on its docket to concern core questions of civil liberties and the separation of powers.
On those core issues, the answers are likely to be “there are none” and “there is none.”
Nicholas Kristof on Canada’s moment at the forefront of liberty.
President Trump’s harsh travel ban reflects a global pattern: All around the world, countries are slamming the doors shut.
One great exception: Canada. It may now be the finest example of the values of the Statue of Liberty.
This isn’t just because Canadian leaders are particularly enlightened, although there’s some of that. It’s mostly because the Canadian people themselves remain astonishingly hospitable, with many groups clamoring for more Syrian refugees.
Just last year I was offered a very nice job, in a very nice little college town, in a lovely area near Toronto, doing work that would have been interesting and useful. I won’t pretend that failing to take that position hasn’t resulted in a good deal of applying-boot-to-own-ass over the last year.
Let’s be clear: Canada has xenophobes, too, and indeed, six people were just killed at a mosque in Quebec. Its people are not intrinsically nicer or more tolerant than Europeans or Americans.
Historically, Canada had a “white Canada” immigration policy steeped in racism and xenophobia. … Yet over the last 50 years, Canada transformed itself — because of determined political leadership, partly by Trudeau, whose son is today prime minister and extols similar ideals. Almost one-fifth of Canadians are what people here describe as “visible minorities” — mostly ethnic Chinese or people with roots in Africa or South Asia — and Muslims constitute three times the percentage of Canadians as of Americans.
I salute you with a splash of maple syrup in my morning yogurt. (Okay, so it is actually rather hideous sugar-free, maple-flavored syrup thickened with some kind of seaweed … but it’s the thought that counts).
Jonathan Stevenson and the wonders of international Trumpism.
In just two weeks in office, President Trump has embarked on a foreign policy that is literally all over the map: insulting the Australian prime minister, threatening a trade war with Mexico and imposing a ham-handed refugee ban that has drawn global condemnation.
And that was the good week.
Over the last week, things took a turn for the worse. Rumors circulated that Mr. Trump, like Barack Obama before him, had already grown tired of Mr. Flynn’s imperiousness. Perhaps to counter the general, President Trump elevated Stephen K. Bannon, his closest political adviser, to a full seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee,” its primary policy-making mechanism. …
It would be bad enough if Mr. Trump had merely brought in a political guru to check an unruly policy adviser (whatever happened to “You’re fired!”?). But at the same time, he downgraded the customarily permanent seat of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the president’s primary military adviser — to a merely discretionary participant
Trump manages to be boldly inespt. Outstanding in the field of awful. Both wrong and wrong-headed, on a grand scale. Enough so that mediation may have to come from outside.
It may not take long for Congress and other officials to side decisively with Mr. Mattis and against an unhinged Mr. Bannon or an eccentric Mr. Flynn, increasingly resisted and isolated by the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community.
Note to Michael Flynn: If you’re standing next to Donald Trump and you still can’t manage to seem reasonable, you may be about to suffocate under the weight of your own ego.
Christine Emba wants to put a few speed bumps in the path of robots.
After all, while we could have anticipated that the iPhone would transform our ability to communicate, we didn’t consider its implications for our workforce and society at large. Smartphone-enabled technologies such as Uber have flattened industries and helped usher in a precarious new “gig economy” in which rates, hours and employment altogether are contingent on the whims of others. Constant connectivity has made leaving the office a thing of the past, to the point of normalizing a workweek of 72 hours or more. The easy accessibility of social media means that our president can casually spark an international crisis at any hour of the day or night.
It’s both fearful and addictive. It’s grown without plan, which is good. And grown without plan, which is terrifying.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to take over not only deep computing but also many of the jobs that underpin our economy. The impending era of self-driving cars could make travel cheaper and safer but could also affect millions of jobs. Virtual reality is lauded as the next frontier — although what we’ll do there is still anyone’s guess. These are technologies whose use may be more unpredictable and more revolutionary than what, at its heart, is still a souped-up telecom device. …
I’m not a Luddite: I don’t suggest that we go back in time, halt change or attempt to preserve in amber an economic structure that already suffers from myriad flaws. But we might consider pausing before our headlong embrace of the next exciting new things already bearing down on us. Have we anticipated the changes they might bring? And are there ways to mitigate the negative effects that might come with the next technological revolution?
Luddites get a bad rap. They weren’t knuckle-draggers against technology for its own sake. They were skilled craftsmen who saw that one of the very first pieces of automation was going to make their hard-won skill and years of apprenticeship worthless. Instead, the machines would allow them to be replaced by anyone (usually, overworked and underfed children) and result in much bigger profits to factory owners with much less pay going to workers. The Luddites were right on every point.
And we still don’t know how to deal with the forces that wrecked their lives.