Ooh. Clever burn, sir. Perhaps sir would like to make an insult involving Kim’s hairstyle? But Trump had another topic for his I-already-miss-the-140-character-limit tweets.
Trump is right. Russia can indeed help … create those problems. If not for Russia’s intervention, there would be no crisis in Ukraine, Assad would have fallen in Syria, and North Korea wouldn’t be propped up by increasing Russian support in spite of sanctions. Anyway, having declared again that he trusts Putin more than his own intelligence agencies, this seems like the perfect time for Trump to brag about how he and Vlad spent the night laughing and braiding each others’ … something.
Leonard Pitts celebrates spring in November.
The Republican Party was thoroughly rebuked in last week’s election, and no party in modern history has ever deserved rebuking more. Nor has any party leader ever deserved spanking more than Donald Trump, the boy president whose backside voters decisively, if tacitly, paddled.
It is not simply that Democrats pummeled Republicans up one coast and down another, winning two governorships and a slew of municipal and state offices. Arguably more impressive was the way they did it — with a rainbow of candidates who served as an implicit stick in the eye to the GOP’s politics of resentment and exclusion.
Holding up the pictures of the Republicans going out next to those of the Democrats coming in could not present a bigger contrast. It’s not a change, it’s a sea change. But Pitts’ enthusiasm is dented by the same shocking interviews with those who still support Trump that disgusted so many this week.
A bunch of sixty-somethings in this town of boarded-up homes and opioid addiction seem most exercised about the “clowns” in the NFL who kneel during the national anthem. “NFL,” says retiree Pam Schilling, stands for “Niggers for life.”
One would be hard-pressed to find more vivid proof that if we intend to take our country back, the rest of us — a term meant to include the perhaps 17 principled conservatives who have so far managed to escape Trump’s re-education camps — will have our work cut out. You can’t persuade these people. You can only defeat them. Last week’s vote proves this isn’t impossible.
It’s not impossible. Also not a given. This week’s victories came not just as a result of the distaste of Trump, but through excellent organizing and a fantastic ground game in the states with critical elections. In 2018, that same level of excellence and enthusiasm needs to be there in all 50 states.
Jonathan Martin isn’t actually a pundit, and this isn’t an editorial … it’s a Twitter thread. But very worth reading.
Those who embrace a syncretistic hybrid of nationalism & Christian rhetoric have turned Jesus into a mascot for a political football team. "Team Jesus" has no relationship whatsoever to orthodox Christian faith. It's a brand name, not a belief system.
"Team Jesus" has no philosophy, no ideology. No shared faith, only shared fear. There is no loyalty to God, but intense loyalty to other players on the team—Bannon, Roy Moore, Trump & his religious acolytes. They are political pragmatists, not true believers.
Martin is an Oklahoma pastor who last week was was banned from Liberty University “for life.” Trump follower Jerry Falwell sent the private university’s private security to grab Martin and throw him out while he was attending a concert, days in advance of a planned prayer meeting.
This is what I found in the dustup with Jerry Falwell Jr. I kept waiting for a theological defense of support for Bannon, et al. But there aren't alternate theological convictions. There aren't theological convictions at all. No serious interest in Christian thought or rhetoric. ...
They do not have theology. They have talking points. They do not have a philosophy. They have sound bites. They do not have a cross to cling to, only guns. They do not have a common faith, only a common enemy.
Want to get a sense of just how far from Christianity—not “mainstream Christianity” or “orthodox Christianity” just … Christianity—the Trumpists really are? Read this thread. Consider it Sunday School. And if you need to follow with a sermon, read Martin’s letter responding to what happened at Liberty.
Lindsay Crouse talking about women’s distance running doesn’t lend itself to neat sound bites.
Instead of being threatened by her teammates’ growing accomplishments, Flanagan embraced them, and brought in more women, elevating them to her level until they become the most formidable group of distance athletes in the nation. National championships, world championships, Olympics: They became some of the best runners in the world.
But the story of runner Shalane Flanagan is fantastic, uplifting, and you can read the whole thing in a sprint. There are lessons here that go way beyond marathon running. Ready. Set. Go!
Michelle Golderg on the less visible, but perhaps more important, victories on Tuesday night.
Seeking resurrection, the religious right turned to local politics, investing in the bench of the Republican Party. “We are training people to be effective — to be elected to school boards, to city councils, to state legislatures and to key positions in political parties,” Pat Robertson wrote in a 1991 Christian Coalition fund-raising letter. The next year, Sarah Palin would get her start by winning a seat on the Wasilla City Council, part of a wave of evangelicals pouring into local politics.
If there is one threadlike silver lining to Donald Trump’s election last year, it’s that it has forced the left to emulate the Christian right’s extremely successful strategy for building political power. For decades, Democrats have paid far less attention to local politics than Republicans. That’s part of the reason the party lost almost a thousand state legislative seats — there are 7383 in total — over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency. But in the last year, citizens nationwide — particularly women and people of color — who were horrified by Trump’s victory have decided to run for office in their own communities. And on Tuesday, many of them won.
And there is room for many, many more. Wherever you live, whatever your background, even if you’ve never run for so much as hall monitor, there are groups out there prepared to help you hit the ground running.
Frank Bruni is watching the Republicans drive off the sexual assault cliff.
When Zeigler was asked by The Washington Examiner about an allegation that the Senate candidate Roy Moore initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32, Zeigler cited the biblical couple to say, essentially: No biggie! This is as old as Christianity.
“Take Joseph and Mary,” he explained. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.” He made it sound as if Moore were some religiously inclined analogue to those military-history enthusiasts who dress in the uniforms of yesteryear to travel back to the Revolutionary War. Moore was merely re-enacting the New Testament in the name of lust.
And all this is super shocking because people who wave their religion around to justify every action in their lives are always … what’s that?
Are you really surprised? If so, you might want to see a doctor about your amnesia, because my memory is pretty spotty and still I can recall Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker and Larry Craig and David Vitter, and with just a few minutes of Googling, I could fill the rest of this column with more names of more pastors and politicians who presented themselves as steadfast moral conservatives and were revealed to be agents of precisely the kind of behavior they so exuberantly condemned. These frauds and hypocrites are as legion now as lepers were in the days of Jesus.
See, there was a biblical analogy in there after all.
Ruth Marcus has one more obscure name to add to the above list.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she who has encountered no argument too weak to embrace, had this to say about allegations that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore molested a 14-year-old girl: “Like most Americans, the president believes we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person’s life. However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”
So many things to unpack in these 46 words. Let’s start with the elephant in the quote, the uncomfortable fact that President Trump was himself the target of such years-old “mere” allegations, more than a dozen, from women who claimed he sexually assaulted them. These were, as then-candidate Trump assured us — and as Sanders, ever willing, reasserted just last month — all “horrible liars,” who would be duly sued after the election. Still waiting, Mr. President.
In fact, what we’re all waiting for is the last domino in this long chain to fall. If Robert Mueller wants to be the one to take down Donald Trump, he may want to move fast.
David Leonhardt and the most popular phrase in the Republican vocabulary.
She was 14 years old at the time. Roy Moore was a 32-year-old prosecutor. He took her to his home in the woods, the woman says, removed both her clothes and his and then molested her. …
After the story’s publication yesterday, the most common reaction from other Republicans was a conditional condemnation that revolved around the words “if true.” A spokeswoman for Vice President Mike Pence said, “If true, this would disqualify anyone from serving in office.” Mitch McConnell’s statement was similar.
It’s a level of bravery right up there with that expressed by Sanders.
I understand why senators might make their immediate response conditional. Maybe they didn’t yet read the story. But once you have read the story, there is only one decent response: Moore, the Republican nominee to become Alabama’s next senator, needs to quit the race immediately.
The “if true” response wrongly suggests that there will be some final reckoning of facts to remove any doubt about what Moore did. But there won’t be. He will likely continue denying the allegations, and people will have to choose between The Post’s reams of evidence and Moore’s lack of it.
This isn’t a single isolated incident whose details might been confused or where intent might have been misunderstood. This is a pattern of behavior carried out with multiple young women over a period of years—and there was nothing subtle, debatable, or defensible about Moore’s actions.
Nicholas Kristof has a proposed legal solution for the former Alabama Supreme Court justice.
For decades, one of the most sanctimonious moralizers in American politics has been Roy Moore, the longtime Bible-thumper in Alabama who crusaded against gays, transgender people, Islam and “sexual perversion.”
Moore suggested just this year that the 9/11 terror attacks were God’s punishment because “we legitimize sodomy.” He has said that homosexuality is “the same thing” as sex with a cow and should be criminalized, and argued that Representative Keith Ellison should not be allowed to serve in Congress because he is a Muslim.
All of which is exactly the kind of crap that won the Republican primary.
The Alabama state auditor, a Republican named Jim Ziegler, defended Moore as “clean as a hound’s tooth” and offered a bizarre defense of child abuse: He asserted that the Virgin Mary was a teenager when Joseph married her (in fact, the Bible does not indicate her age), adding: “They became parents of Jesus.”
Sigh. When Christians cite the Bible to defend child molestation, Jesus should sue for defamation.
Can we get a Second Coming … for legal purposes?
Colbert King on that other religious suggestion brought to you by team Joseph Did It Too.
Shortly after last Sunday’s massacre at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, told Fox News, “In Texas at least we have the opportunity to have concealed carry.” Asked whether it was appropriate to bring guns inside a church, Paxton said, “We need people in churches . . . at least arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond if something like this, when something like this happens again.” …
In California, Geoff Peabody has been teaching free gun-safety courses to local church members. He’s trained close to 1,000 people, and all of his classes have been accident-free. “We are directed to protect the flock,” he told a local television station.
Gee, it seems like someone already has that job. Someone who maybe should come to mind even faster than Smith or Wesson.
Set aside for the moment the risk of armed church members confusing congregants they don’t recognize with an assailant, or the danger of friendly fire, or protectors who accidentally mishandle their lethal weapons.
Consider what we are giving in to. Some may call it reality. How about resignation? To think: gunning up and hunkering down in a house of God.
A group of armed people huddled fearfully in a church happens all the time on the Walking Dead and other fine examples of gory, lawless, post-apocalyptic drama. It’s not that civilization ended while we weren’t looking. Because we were.
Elizabeth Bruenig wonders when’s the last time someone looked at the Constitution.
After the mass shooting before last, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly articulated what anti-gun-control politics seem to presume but rarely admit: that blood is the cost of the right to bear arms. “This is the price of freedom,” O’Reilly wrote on his blog, referring to the dozens killed in Las Vegas. “Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.” He went on: “The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.”
This is a special, even radical, type of freedom — the kind that entitles a person to own the means of mass killing and the kind that compels society to grant that right. (Devin Kelley, the shooter in Sutherland Springs, Tex., last weekend, was legally forbidden to buy a gun because of his history of domestic violence, but various polls from states experimenting with such bans show that some Americans still feel ambivalent about keeping firearms from convicted abusers.) How did the United States become a country where half of gun owners feel intolerably constrained if they can’t own an assault-type weapon or a high-capacity magazine?
I still have the shotgun I used to hunt in Kentucky when I was a teenager. It’s plugged to hold only three shells — by law. That’s on a pump-action shotgun, already not the fastest reloading weapon in the world. And yet, somehow no one seemed to argue that limiting the number of shells was going to cause some kind of horrible problem, either in hunting or in using that weapon in “home defense.”
The last time I checked, that law still stood. Because shotguns are still actually used for hunting. So the NRA doesn’t care about them. The big profits go with the big magazines and actions that can be paired to a bumpstock, and those are reserved for weapons whose sole purpose is mowing down people in large numers.
The answer Bruenig provides gives some real insight into how we got here … and maybe how we start to tiptoe away from the wasteland.
The answer is historical. It’s the story of how Western thought moved from seeing freedom as a means to an end — what philosophers call “the good” — to seeing freedom as an end in itself. Thanks to our liberal heritage, we regard freedom as an intrinsic good, perhaps the highest one of all. The more of it we can get, the better off we are. Right? …
But freedom unchained from the good comes with certain hazards. Today, it seems like devising a vision of the good means curtailing people’s liberty; after all, it does require that we define some choices (bestiality, for instance) as inherently wrong and perhaps limit them, even if they make a person happy. Yet this also means that the greater the swell of public sentiment against gun ownership, the more justified its ardent defenders seem in claiming that their freedom is under attack. The way they see it, not only is their freedom to do as they please threatened, so is their freedom to be pleased by what they’re pleased by.
One of the big arguments we need to have is … how to have this argument more effectively.
If you missed the Abbreviated Science Round-up on Saturday, give it a try.