Forget rabbit season and duck season, this is Yeats season; the season of searching out fresh metaphors for ruin when your greatest fears have long been surpassed.
After all, the worst is not just full of awful passion, but delivering his blank and pitiless intensity in 144 character bursts of blood-dimmed nightmare while tucked up among the pillows of the White House. Never has that damned gyre yawned so infinitely wide. Never has it seemed so appropriate to grab the nearest set of lapels, roughly direct their owner toward the The Second Coming, and shout, “Read it! Read it!”
And … then what? Unraveling is Donald Trump’s game, and he plays it instinctively well. I’m not one to lend him credit for this, or for anything. It’s not a strategy, or even a skill; just a bullish ignorance that happened to lumber on stage at a time, in a country, where the cracks were already wide enough for blind bullishness be all that was needed to part the final strings.
So the center has not held. But then, the center had been sick for a long time. Trump just parted tattered threads left by the Reagan Revolution, and Gingrich’s “Contract with America”, and the Tea Party Wave—all of which waged war on the whole idea of the center. They hated the thought that there was anything to be found in compromise and cooperation. They detested the idea that power could serve someone other than the powerful. They hunted and destroyed anyone within their own party who still tried to live as if there were a purpose for the government, other than to eliminate government’s purpose.
What we got from each successive Republican uprising was an economic theory that has no basis in reality. A theory of governing that had no root in service. An idea of America that sees most Americans as suspect. And a triumph of the id that treats disagreement as treason.
There’s no reason to compromise with any of that. There is no good idea to be found anywhere in the Republican Party. Not one single policy worth co-opting or even considering now lives on the right. All that remains is a kind of Lovecraftian awfulness — Lovecraftian in every sense, including the thick and constant thread of racism.
So where to go then? I’m following Leonard Pitts … right after this break.
Leonard Pitts has a signpost for Democrats
As internecine fighting loudly fractures the GOP, Democrats quietly struggle with a civil war of their own. Largely shut out of power at the state and federal levels, the party is torn between pragmatists who want to chase Donald Trump’s voters with a centrist economic agenda and insurrectionists a la Bernie Sanders who want to move hard to the left. What should Democrats do?
As I said, I’ve been wrestling with that. And I finally have an answer.
The Democrats need to move left.
For someone like Pitts, who considers himself a centrist, this is a hard decision, for someone like myself — who considers Bernie a centrist — it’s the only decision.
It is a fantasy for a party heavily populated by African Americans, Muslims, the LGBTQ, immigrants and other marginalized peoples yearning to breathe free in an increasingly oppressive environment, to think it can attract angry, older white voters who believe that what America really needs is to be made “great again.”
No one manufactures tents that big.
What other option, then, do Democrats have but to move left, exploiting the anger, energy and enthusiasm to be found there? It’s an imperfect solution for all the reasons noted above, but it has one advantage: It clarifies the choices, makes them stark. That would be a good thing just now.
There is no reasonable compromise to be made, and anyone who tries to step into the center is only going to find that big, twisting hole to nowhere. Moving firmly left isn’t just a good choice, it’s the only possible choice. That it also happens to be the right direction for the party, the country, and a little thing called the dignity of mankind, is a very nice bonus for a move that also happens to be politically expedient.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky of the inherent conflict between white nationalism and democracy
When rapid immigration and terrorist attacks occur simultaneously — and the terrorists belong to the same ethnic or religious group as the new immigrants — the combination of fear and xenophobia can be dangerous and destructive. In much of Europe, fear of jihadists (who pose a genuine security threat) and animosity toward refugees (who generally do not) have been conflated in a way that allows far-right populists to seize on Islamic State attacks as a pretext to shut the doors to desperate refugees, many of whom are themselves fleeing the Islamic State, and to engage in blatant discrimination against Muslim fellow citizens.
But this isn’t happening only in European countries. In recent years, anti-immigration rhetoric and nativist policies have become the new normal in liberal democracies from Europe to the United States.
Considering that America elected Trump and so far Western European nations have avoided making a similar mistake, the United States now represents the cautionary tale that hopefully informs Europe against these jackwipes.
Despite the breathless warnings of impending Islamic conquest sounded by alarmist writers and pandering politicians, the risk of Islamization of the West has been greatly exaggerated. Islamists are not on the verge of seizing power in any advanced Western democracy or even winning significant political influence at the polls.
If you read right-wing news sources, you will run into stories that make it seem as if Islamic law is already in force in some sections of the country and that cities in America, despite the fact that Muslims make up less than one percent of the population in the United States. It’s necessary that the alt-Reich inflate the size of the threat, so they can justify the breadth of their racist reactions.
Sarah Polley on women in entertainment — and women as entertainment.
One day, when I was 19 years old, I was in the middle of a photo shoot for a Miramax film when I was suddenly told it was time to leave. I was wearing a little black dress, showing a lot of cleavage, lying seductively on my side and looking slyly at the camera. The part I had played in the movie, “Guinevere,” could not have been more removed from this pose. My character was an awkward girl, bumbling, in fact, who wore sweatshirts and jeans, and had little sense of her sexual power. But this was how they were going to sell the movie, and at a certain point, I was tired of being a problem, which is how a female actor is invariably treated whenever she points out that she is being objectified or not respected.
I was pulled out of the photo shoot abruptly. The publicist said that we needed to be in Harvey Weinstein’s office in 20 minutes.
Polley’s piece shows Weinstein as the person he has proven to be over and over, a slimebucket who used his power, a promises of what that power could do, to sexually abuse the women he dealt with. But it also shows a conflict that’s built into the way women are cast in films, the roles they play, and the publicity they do to support the industry.
On sets, I saw women constantly pressured to exploit their sexuality and then chastised as sluts for doing so. Women in technical jobs were almost nonexistent, and when they were there, they were constantly being tested to see if they really knew what they were doing. You felt alone, in a sea of men. I noticed my own tendency to want to be “one of the boys,” to distance myself from the humiliation of being a woman on a film set, where there were so few of us. Then came the photo shoots in which you were treated like a model with no other function than to sell your sexuality, regardless of the nature of the film you were promoting.
Polley’s essay is enlightening not just because it deals with Weinstein — and with how the industry had a general knowledge of who he was and what he did at least twenty years before he was called on it — but how the film industry too closely reflects other corporate environments, ones in which the men at the top often got their by being aggressive, bullying jerks. If you chose to skip most of the similarly-themed Weinstein articles this morning (too many of which are interested more in running a score card on who spoke out when, than in condemning Weinstein’s actions) read this one anyway.
I want to believe that the intense wave of disgust at this sort of behavior will lead to real change. …
I hope that the ways in which women are degraded, both obvious and subtle, begin to seem like a thing of the past.
Kathleen Parker delivers one more smack toward Weinstein.
Weinstein, whose whiskered jowls and corpulent corpus are perfectly cast for the villainous character he plays in life, is but the latest in a lineup of high-profile alleged predators, including Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and, long before, President Bill Clinton. It bears mentioning that most of these men have never been formally charged or tried for sexual crimes in a court of law, but convicted in a trial by Twitter in which the presumption of guilt overrides any consideration of due process. This isn’t to defend any of them, but shouldn’t we save a little of our outrage for these truncated expressions of “justice”?
Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly, Clinton … wait a sec. Isn’t she forgetting someone? Hmm. What was that name. So now she’s discussing Cosby’s background. Ailes’ tenure at Fox. Clinton’s impeachment … and still we have’t had anyone else come up. Wait! There it is. Hugh Hefner. That must be who I was thinking of.
And yes, you can take from this that Parker manages to write an article on powerful men who have used their positions to evade punishment for sexually harassing and assaulting women—an article she opens with a discussion on hypocrisy—and never mentions Donald Trump. I guess Parker proves her own point: Everyone really is a hypocrite.
David Von Drahle on Trump’s obsession with IQ tests
Trump’s notion that intelligence is reflected in a single number — wearable on a jersey, flashable on a scoreboard — is the opposite of wisdom. Worse, it is the root of an intellectual isolation that endangers the country he leads. Trump finds himself increasingly at odds with his own staff and at war with would-be allies. He is squandering perhaps the most precious presidential power: the ability to surround oneself with a challenging mix of insightful and experienced advisers.
Too many people discussing Trump’s IQ assume that he has some high number. Don’t make that assumption. Yeah, IQ tests are useless in predicting success, racially biased, and even when they “work” are diagnostic of only a particular brand of problem solving. But all that aside, I’ll bet genuine dollars that Donald Trump can’t rustle up an IQ that wouldn’t requite a sweater if it was on your weather forecast.
Some highly intelligent women and men serve on Trump’s staff, Tillerson among them. Yet sources tell Vanity Fair that the president has been fuming lately, “I hate everyone in the White House.” Frustrated with Congress, he attacks the political intelligence of Mitch McConnell, the moral intelligence of John McCain, the diplomatic intelligence of Bob Corker. A smarter president would be hungry for dissenting views and willing to hear from well-meaning critics, because listening is learning, and the more you learn, the more you win.
Some people are willing to concede that Trump may have once gotten an average score on an IQ test and thought he’d aced it. I’m calling bull on even that. Give that man a test.
Dana Milbank reads from the Bible according to Republicans.
Seems Roy Moore, the Ten Commandments Judge and very likely the next U.S. senator from the state of Alabama, has been playing a bit fast and loose with the whole thou-shalt-not-bear-false-witness thing.
… Moore, who claimed he did not take a “regular salary” from the Christian-values charity he founded, in fact received $180,000 a year — more than $1 million from 2007 to 2012 — in compensation, much of which the charity did not disclose.
Well, a million dollars can hardly be called a “regular salary.” Regular people don’t make that kind of money. So … there.
Still, Moore is in better shape, in terms of biblical injunctions, than Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), who is giving up his seat in Congress after admitting to an adulterous affair with a woman half his age. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the married congressman, a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, appeared to have asked his mistress to have an abortion.
Just give it a couple of years. Murphy will return from this little “walk on the Appalachian Trail” rested, restored, and ready to a new office.
During the Harvey Weinstein fallout, Donald Trump Jr. and Kellyanne Conway have gleefully attacked private-citizen Hillary Clinton for failing to denounce Weinstein more quickly than she did — even though they vigorously defended the elder Trump when he was found to have boasted of sexual assault.
Locker room. Locker room. Locker room. It doesn’t really mean anything, but apparently it’s a fine excuse for the people who elected Trump and Murphy — and for those who will vote for Moore.
Adam Schiff is the ranking Democratic Congressman on the House intelligence Committee
In 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin directed an active-measures campaign of unprecedented scale against the United States. His object was to sow discord among Americans and influence the outcome of the presidential election. The Kremlin’s multipronged influence operation was not targeted at the United States alone but was part of a global attack on liberal democracy. …
Indeed, the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia used its paid media outlets, as well as technology firms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and potentially others as a part of this effort has been borne out by the ever-increasing identification of Russian advertisements, promoted tweets, fake news and fake accounts designed to covertly move public opinion and stoke division.
The way that Russia did this was, in many cases, not by directly sending advertisements supporting Trump, but by anti-targeting, by sending targeted ads that were designed to drive up ire and discord. In a sense, the social media tools and big data systems we left lying around were like a loaded gun. Russia simply used it against us.
… there are growing calls from the White House and outside parties aligned with the president to halt the congressional investigations rather than allow the evidence to dictate the pace and breadth of our inquiry. The White House may hope it can prematurely end the congressional probes and then apply pressure to wrap up special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s work as well.
Unless that pressure comes in the form of some attempt by Congress or the Justice Department to actually interfere with the special counsel’s ability to proceed, I’m not sure Mueller is going to care. But the whole idea that anyone could still be screaming “haven’t found anything” at this point, is ridiculous. What’s already in public should be more than sufficient to indict Manafort and Flynn, probably enough to indict Kushner, and hopefully enough to indict Trump … and that’s just what’s in public.
Lindy West was personally attacked in that Buzzfeed collection of Steve and Milo emails.
This month, BuzzFeed News published a truly astonishing exposé on the so-called alt-right, the youth-driven, arch-conservative online movement that is at least partly responsible for Donald Trump’s rise to power and has been an indispensable siege engine in his war on truth. An unnamed entity sent BuzzFeed a cache of emails from the former Breitbart editor and alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos — Steve Bannon’s protégé — revealing that Yiannopoulos has been working intimately with white nationalist leaders to normalize radical far-right ideology, particularly among disaffected white youth. …
How did such a conglomerate of transparent bigots (transparent by any honest reckoning, at least) achieve enough mainstream credibility to win the White House? Well, because they said, over and over, that they weren’t bigots — the “nu-uh” defense.
The alt-right insisted it was not racist even as its swastika-clad minions marched on Charlottesville, Va., and its president relentlessly demonized Muslims and Mexican immigrants and trafficked in vile stereotypes about the lives of black Americans. The alt-right insisted it was not sexist even as its online foot soldiers harassed feminist writers into hiding and its president bragged about committing sexual assault. Plausible deniability was the alt-right’s Trojan horse, and the media ate it up, running puff pieces that cast Yiannopoulos as an outrageous cad and interviewing neo-Nazis to get “their side” of the story.
West’s article not only gives a powerful indictment of the content of those Breitbart emails, it also shows how she was treated when she was asked to comment by such outlets as MSNBC — which, sadly, comes off as about as considerate as an evening with Harvey Weinstein.
Colbert King on why he has a gun, but not a concealed carry permit
I know my way around guns, having fired an M1 rifle in Army training. I also am familiar with pistols. During my years as a special agent with the State Department in the ’60s, I was qualified in the use of a .38-caliber pistol and a .357 magnum. These were the weapons issued when I was assigned to protect visiting foreign heads of state.
And that is the reason I will not seek a concealed-carry pistol license.
While my own weapon is trigger-locked with the key out of reach, I don’t particularly like myself when I have a gun on my hip.
It’s not that having a weapon makes people feel safe — people deserve to feel safe. It’s that having a weapon makes people feel powerful, and that’s how guns go from being carried, to being used.
Recalling my experience years ago … I liked the experience way too much.
I loved the weight of the weapon on my hip, the glances I got from the people on the streets, in the hotels and at receptions who noticed the gun when my jacket slid open.
If you start to feel like the ability to take human lives with ease makes you cool, it’s definitely time to lock up the gun.