Daily Beast:
In one email exchange, a State Department official feels the need to explain that lowering punitive sanctions on the Russian oil industry would be rewarding Moscow—without getting anything from the Kremlin in return.
“Russia continues to occupy Ukraine including Crimea—conditions that led to the sanctions have not changed,” the official wrote.
The continued discussion of unilaterally lifting sanctions on Russia came after the dismissal of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as White House national security adviser. Flynn is now in the crosshairs of congressional and Justice Department investigators looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, which the U.S. intelligence community concluded carried out a year-long campaign to influence the 2016 elections in Trump’s favor.
The Obama administration imposed sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea, invading eastern Ukraine, supporting the Syrian regime, and later, for alleged cyberattacks meant to influence the U.S. election. European nations imposed similar sanctions over Ukraine in 2014 and renewed them late last year.
Hmmmmmm. I wonder why everyone is suspicious of Trump wanting to lift sanctions?
Stuff:
Bird-flipping welcome for US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in New Zealand
US media travelling with Tillerson were surprised by the number of people flipping the bird at Tillerson as his motorcade sped through town.
New York Times correspondent Gardiner Harris said he had been in a lot of motorcades but even he was taken back by the negative reaction.
Wall Street Journal:
The Buck Stops Everywhere Else
Trump undermines his own travel ban and Justice Department.
Some people with a propensity for self-destructive behavior can’t seem to help themselves, President Trump apparently among them. Over the weekend and into Monday he indulged in another cycle of Twitter outbursts and pointless personal feuding that may damage his agenda and the powers of the Presidency.
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
Lee's Reputation Can't Be Redeemed
The question isn’t whether Robert E. Lee was a successful military commander—it’s why American communities continue to honor a Confederate leader.
On Sunday, I published an essay on the myth of Robert E. Lee. [and well worth the read — GD] The fascinating thing about Dan McLaughlin’s response to that essay in National Review is how little it takes issue with.
McLaughlin does not dispute that Lee was a cruel slavemaster who engaged in dubious interpretation of his father-in-law’s will to maintain possession of his slaves until a court ruled against him; that Lee betrayed his country in defense of slavery; that Lee turned a blind eye to the massacres and humiliations of black soldiers by his subordinates; that Lee kidnapped free blacks and returned them to slavery during his invasion of the North; that Lee publicly opposed the rights of the freedmen after the war; or that Lee, as president of Washington College, turned a blind eye to his students engaging in racist terrorism while punishing them harshly for trying to take extra time off on Christmas. Indeed, McLaughlin concedes, “Lee was no hero; he fought for an unjust cause, and he lost.”…
McLaughlin concludes that I am making a “contemporary political cause” out of the Civil War, and that my “interest in attacking General Lee is transparently about the present, not the past.”
This, I’m afraid, is correct. My contemporary political cause is demonstrating that white supremacy is a monstrous ideology that has cost hundreds of millions of Americans very dearly over centuries, and that its greatest champions are not heroes worthy of admiration. I’m sorry that’s a fight we’re still having in the present, and that it did not end with Appomattox. The cult of Lee is party to blame.
You got 3 million less votes, little man, and you’ll never live it down. Let’s see what the Russia probe says.
Politico:
Trump needs quick wins, but Congress not poised to deliver
With the Russia probe heating up, the president could face a rough few months without legislative victories to tout.
In other words, as the special prosecutor probe into potential Russian collusion heats up, White House officials fear it could be a long, hot summer — with few tangible accomplishments to tout. And they worry how an antsy president, who wants things done immediately and has a rudimentary understanding of the legislative process, will handle it — particularly if the investigation dominates news media coverage.
Ezra Klein/Vox:
The mystery of the 2016 election was its normalcy
In politics, one identity rules them all.
The Democratic candidate won 89 percent of Democratic voters and the Republican candidate won 90 percent of Republican voters. The Democrat won minorities, women, and the young; the Republican won whites, men, and the old. The Democrat won a few percentage points more of the two-party vote than the Republican, just as had happened four years before, and four years before that. If you had known nothing about the candidates or conditions in the 2016 election but had been asked to predict the results, these might well have been the results you’d predicted. So what was there to explain?
And in the darkness binds them.
David A. Hopkins/blog:
The Price of Resentment Politics Is Policy Failure
The realities of partisan politics will compel most Republicans to defend Trump in public even as they complain about him to reporters on background. Even if they do so privately, though, it is time for party members to reflect upon how a candidate like Trump was able to win the Republican nomination and sufficiently unify the party to achieve the presidency. After all, Trump hasn't really changed since he began running nearly two years ago. Nothing that he's done in office should be surprising to anyone except those who fooled themselves into expecting something different.
Julia Azari/Vox:
Around the time it was becoming socially acceptable for political scientists to accept that Donald Trump might win the Republican Party nomination for president, I wrote that perhaps the party had decided not to decide — that Trump offered useful cover for deeper and more intractable problems. While we are no longer living in those innocent times, I stand by two basic premises: Trump was a candidate who crashed the Republican Party, and the conditions within the party allowed that to happen.
People have different theories of what exactly happened during the 2016 nomination season, but I still think the most important causal factor was the party’s inability to coordinate. This problem also helps explain why the GOP is so focused and ideological, and yet still so divided.