For more than a year now, I’ve been starting the Sunday Abbreviated Pundit Round-up with images from Compound Interest. I’ve enjoyed it, and on several occasions (as with the Flint Water crisis), chemistry teacher Andy Brunning—who runs the site as a solo act—provided timely, as well as insightful, material. However, there have been some complaints that the material can sometimes seem frivolous on a day when the news is somber. So, I’m in the market for a new opening act, and I’m open to suggestions. I could look for an image out of the stories of the week that seems to best capture the tone of the day. I could emulate the good doctor and assemble a collage of headlines. Please provide your own thoughts in the comments. And if you get a chance, send Mr. Brunning a thank you for all the infographics over the past year. Well done, sir.
Leonard Pitts was supposed to be on vacation this week. However, he’s found that even being halfway around the globe can’t remove the immediacy of events, or make them any easier to understand.
Two more black men shot down for no good reason in a country that still insists — with righteous indignation, yet — upon equating black men with danger.
That’s madness. …
I am required to fear what might happen to my children when they encounter those who are supposed to serve and protect them.
That’s madness.
Twelve police officers shot by sniper fire, five fatally, while guarding a peaceful demonstration against police brutality.
That’s madness.
The usual loud voices of acrimony and confusion are already using this act of despicable evil to delegitimize legitimate protest ...
That is madness.
And then, there was this coda: A black man, a “person of interest” turns himself in to police after carrying an AR-15 rifle through the protest in downtown Dallas. … The NRA calls that freedom.
But make no mistake: It, too, is madness.
I’ve pushed the limits of fair use because I couldn’t resist the clarity, rhythm, honesty and power of Pitts’ words. As I’ve said on so many Sundays, go read the whole thing.
Dammit, I wish the nation would let the man take a vacation. But we need him.
Now, come on in. Let’s see what else is in the papers.
Matthew Miller points out that all the people bending over to talk about James Comey’s non-partisan purity are missing the giant signboard the FBI Director is flashing.
When FBI Director James B. Comey stepped to the lectern to deliver his remarks about Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, he violated time-honored Justice Department practices for how such matters are to be handled, set a dangerous precedent for future investigations and committed a gross abuse of his own power. …
Justice Department rules set clear guidelines for when it is appropriate for the government to comment about individuals involved in an ongoing investigation, which this matter was until prosecutors closed it Wednesday. Prosecutors and investigators can reassure the public that a matter is being taken seriously, and in some rare cases can provide additional information to protect public safety, such as when a suspect is loose and poses a danger.
And when the department closes an investigation, it typically does so quietly, at most noting that it has investigated the matter fully and decided not to bring charges.
What Comey did was entirely the equivalent of a County prosecutor stepping out to say “well, we put all this great evidence in front of the Grand Jury. They didn’t indict, but just listen as I air all the supposed negative evidence while no one acts in defense.” It was unprofessional. It was unfair. It was ugly.
In a case where the government decides it will not submit its assertions to that sort of rigorous scrutiny by bringing charges, it has the responsibility to not besmirch someone’s reputation by lobbing accusations publicly instead. Prosecutors and agents have followed this precedent for years.
If there’s one person who does not deserve the plaudits he’s collected from either side of the aisle this week, it’s James Comey. While he was so busy telling us about the importance of his honor, he didn’t hesitate for a moment to demean the honor of Hillary Clinton. Under a pretense of being “open” he was simply vindictive. He deserves no praise for that.
Dana Milbank is more concerned about Republican attacks on Comey.
Republicans summoned FBI Director James B. Comey to Capitol Hill on Thursday to question him about his determination that Hillary Clinton did not break the law with her use of a private email server. They termed it an “emergency” hearing, and their questions were correspondingly urgent.
But like way too many people this week, Milbank seemed impressed that Comey defended himself. And yes, the GOP’s inability to still search for some means of using these results as a weapon is painfully awful. But it’s also expected.
Comey, who otherwise endured five hours of questioning with patience and calm, denounced the “insinuation” Mica had made and told him what he should tell his constituents: “Look me in the eye and listen to what I’m about to say,” the FBI chief said. “I did not coordinate that [statement] with anyone. The White House, the Department of Justice, nobody outside the FBI family had any idea what I was about to say. I say that under oath. I stand by that. There was no coordination, no.”
I’ve no doubt that Comey did not coordinate his statement with anyone. Including with anyone at the FBI. Because if he’d taken two minutes to think about doing his job, rather than doing a Pontius Pilate act, he would have passed the FBI’s recommendation to Justice without the stage show.
Frank Bruni finds Americans driven apart, by shared experiences that no one wants to share.
We have disagreements about how to get there, but they don’t warrant the inflammatory headlines that appeared on the front of The New York Post (“Civil War”) or at the top of The Drudge Report (“Black Lives Kill”). They needn’t become hardened battle lines.
“We have devolved into some separatism and we’ve taken our corners,” Malik Aziz, the deputy chief of police in Dallas, said in an interview with CNN on Friday. “Days like yesterday or the day before — they shouldn’t happen. But when they do, let’s be human beings. Let’s be honorable men and women and sit down at a table and say, ‘How can we not let this happen again?’ and be sincere in our hearts.”
Malik Aziz, Chief David Brown and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings deserve unlimited praise for their handling of events in that city this week. If there is a stitch still binding the nation together, it is these three men. While too many people have sought to rub salt in the wounds, they’ve been gracious. Thoughtful.
Knowing there’s little chance the words will ever wend to them, I still want to say “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Hillary Clinton wrestled with that confusion in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, stressing, “We can’t be engaging in hateful rhetoric.” Asked if and why she’d be better at dealing with race relations than Donald Trump would, she declined to disparage him. This wasn’t the moment for that.
But notice that it was still the moment when Blitzer thought it appropriate to try and force an argument. Because if there was anyone who demonstrated—again—that they have no sense of respect for the moment, it was Blitzer.
Seth Stoughton is concerned for the same reasons we’re all concerned about where we go with policing in America.
The vivid, horrifying videos of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling dying at the hands of police officers have brought new attention to fatal police shootings. The terrifying ambush that took the lives of five Dallas police officers and wounded seven others has brought new attention to attacks on the police.
And so, I am afraid. Not of the violence itself. Even considering recent high-profile events and heightened attention to police shootings, violence both by and against police officers remains relatively rare and has been in decline for years. But I am afraid of the impact these events will have on the already-strained relationship between police and the communities they serve.
Stoughton refers back to Ferguson and the distrust of not just the police, but the official version of events leading to the shooting of Michael Brown. A distrust that came expressly because of the way the investigation was handled.
The fractured relationship between the local police and the community ultimately endangered hundreds of officers and thousands of civilians, resulting in millions of dollars of damage. This is nothing new. Half of the 10 most violent and destructive riots in U.S. history were responses to perceived police abuses.
To see police doing it right, you don’t have to look any further than the programs that were underway, and hopefully will continue to make progress, in Dallas. On the other hand, the police in St. Louis did everything wrong following the shooting of Michael Brown. In the face they showed to the media, to the community, to the protesters, they were closed, hostile, agitated and militaristic. The unrest in Ferguson wasn’t caused only by the shooting of Brown, but also by every us-vs-them act of police and other officials afterwards.
Eugene Robinson looks for a way out of the madness.
Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. Both statements must be made true if the heartbreaking loss of life in Dallas is to have any meaning.
The killing spree that left five police officers dead and seven others wounded should be classified as an act of domestic terrorism. The shooter, identified as 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson, apparently believed he was committing an act of political violence. Our duty, to honor the fallen, is to ensure that Johnson’s vile and cowardly act has the opposite impact from what he sought. ...
But the solution is not more guns. The solution is to end the undervaluing of lives, both black and blue.
Poor, troubled, crime-ridden communities are those that most want and need effective policing. But the paradigm cannot be us versus them. It has to be us with us — a relationship of mutual respect.
There seems little doubt that Johnson was trying to instigate more violence. Let’s not do what he wanted. Right now, while everyone in the room is hurting, let’s reach out to get comfort, and give comfort, and honor the good, and revile the evil. And acknowledge our shared humanity.
Danielle Allen has a unique take on the cause of the violence, and a solution.
You will be skeptical of my answer but in the years since I published a book called “Talking to Strangers,” I have been watching the course we were on and I keep coming back to the same answer. I truly believe that the war on drugs is responsible for the level of violence in our cities, the militarization of the police, a concomitant distortion of policing habits and a process of degradation of inner-city minority communities that is now decades-long.
Americans of all races use drugs and do so, with the exception of Asian Americans, at roughly the same rates; yet our laws are disproportionately enforced against African American and Latino Americans. Our hypocrisy has cut into our soul.
We talk about it all the time—the unfairness of sentencing guidelines, the unevenness of conviction rates, and the cost of the sprawling prison-industrial complex. But it oddly seems to disappear from the conversion following violent events.
While Allen’s case may seem a little neat in the abstract—drug crimes clog the justice system, violent crimes get less attention than they should, the perception that violence goes unpunished erodes the justice relationship at both ends—it’s also compelling.
Police have been on the front lines of the war on drugs. As such, they, too, must be recognized as being among its victims. They are obliged to enforce foolish laws and in so doing incur the wrath of their fellow citizens.
The importance of sentencing reform and removing the incentives for going after non-violent drug offenders may be even greater than we think.
Ross Douthat began his piece in a too-cute-by-far imitation of a literary work, and couldn’t resist pointlessly dragging the Pope into his “this is the 60’s again” argument (because Douthat can’t go five minutes without arguing that liberalism is killing the church, that’s why), but he settled down in Act Two.
But now for a reality check, a reminder of the stark differences between Nixon-era America and our own. There is no Vietnam War, no draft, no Weather Underground, no spate of political assassinations. There is no massive crime wave, no urban collapse, no surge in social pathology. Our campus protests are more “days of wounded self-righteous hypersensitivity” than days of rage. The millennial generation seems atomized but relatively well-behaved, their passions channeled into virtual realms (Twitter fights, video games, porn) rather than the streets. The post-Ferguson spike in homicides is real, but the generation-long decline in violent crime is still the more important social fact.
As grim as race relations can seem, the Dallas shootings took place in a country with a two-term black president, in a state where conservative politicians backed sentencing reform, in a city where a black police chief has cut crime rates and complaints of police brutality. These are realities that even an ugly spasm of violence is unlikely to undo
Let’s hope that, for once, Douthat is right. While the presence of Lincoln’s better angels has seemed painfully tenuous this week, perhaps we’ll still remember them. And they, us.
Emma Roller on how Trump turned the rules of politics into Humpty Dumpty, and why we may never assemble the pieces again.
The Trump campaign has almost single-handedly blown up a key pieces of conventional wisdom in American politics. Some of them were already on their way out, but the Trump campaign lit the fuse. Virtually everything I’ve been taught to look for — every sure sign that a campaign is succeeding or failing — has turned out to be irrelevant. Mr. Trump had no political experience, no real campaign operation, no ground game, no fund-raising apparatus and no institutional support within his own party. He was the distinctively coifed canary in the coal mine of American two-party politics. And he has survived longer than almost anybody thought possible.
In the interest of putting my own brain back together again, here’s five rules Donald Trump has broken, and how he pulled it off.
Rule Number Zero: if you want to read the five rules, you’ll need to read the article. But you won’t regret it.
Special note from the land of nuttiness: Last week as I was putting together an even more abbreviated then usual version of this post, I noted that I had been running a high fever for several days, and had also been unable to sleep. Somewhere in the middle of the post, I began to receive comments. Which was odd, because I hadn’t posted it yet. Then the comments handily explained that they had been accidentally cross linked from the future, and were being sent from after the time when the post was live. And the surest proof that I was in serious delirium, is that this seemed perfectly reasonable.
But at least the comments from the future didn’t tell me what an awful week it was going to be. I can be glad of that much.
And if you come across the other end of the pipe and find yourself firing messages into the past … no, don’t tell me. I’m feeling better. I’d hate to ruin it now.