WaPo:
For Democrats, the rapid loss of power in the states is both cause for alarm and some reason for hope. Republicans posted enormous gains in the states and in Congress in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014. If it happened for the GOP, Democrats ask, why couldn’t it happen for them?
Midterm elections for a new president generally result in losses, sometimes substantial losses, and Trump currently suffers from the lowest approval ratings of any new president at this point in a first term. That’s compounded by the fact that the president and congressional Republicans have so far failed to enact a health-care bill, which could dampen enthusiasm among many GOP voters.
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:
The Democratic Self-Sabotage Continues
There's only one way out of our current crisis of government.
I swear to god, if you invited 20 Democratic and/or liberal partisans to a four-star, five-course meal at the finest restaurant in all Provence, at least eight of them would get up, cross the room, and start fighting over who gets to eat out of the dog's bowl. Presented with a legitimate national crisis in the White House, and presented with the golden political opportunity that said crisis is almost entirely the fault of the Republican Party, which has demonstrated that it is wholly incapable of handling it, the Democratic Party has a chance to realign the electoral map over (at least) the next four years. All that's required is shrewdness, patience, and the ability to resist cannibalizing themselves long enough to watch the dry rot collapse the other side entirely.
Fat fcking chance.
Right at the moment, the main issues within the Democratic Party seem to be, in no particular order: Kamala Harris: Threat or Menace?; Cory Booker: Sure, Legal Weed But Wall Street?; and, that evergreen squabble, Bernie Or Hillary; Why 2016 Will Never End. This is like that old Twilight Zone episode where The Major, The Clown, The Tramp, and The Bagpiper are all stuck in a windowless, impenetrable tube. Eventually, we discover that these characters are all dolls, and that the container is filled with a little kid's playthings. The current counterproductive exercises render promising Democratic politicians—including Harris and Booker—into toys for the ideological imagination, and not real people with the real potential to help end the political and governmental crisis in which the country placed itself last November.
We aren’t nuts about it here, but twitter and the rest of social media is another story all together, especially when the paid trolls and disrupters come out to play.
Vann Newkirk II/Atlantic:
The Myth of Reverse Racism
The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
The usage of “reverse racism” and “reverse discrimination” arose in direct response to affirmative and race-based policies in the 1970s. Even as outright quotas and more open attempts to equalize the numbers of minority enrollees were defeated, the term stuck. A 1979 California Law Review article defines reverse discrimination as a phenomenon where “individual blacks and members of other minority groups began to be given benefits at the expense of whites who, apart from race, would have had a superior claim to enjoy them.”
Reverse racism—or any race-conscious policy—became a common grievance, one that helped shape a certain post-civil-rights-movement view of America where black people were the favored children of the state, and deserving white people were cast aside.
A recent Twitter thread from the Refinery29 writer Ashley Ford illustrates an example of just how common and extreme that grievance has become. She recounted personal anecdotes about acquaintances who assumed that black people could simply attend college for free:
Carol Anderson/NY Times:
The Policies of White Resentment
Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs,” a denial of citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces and a renewed war on drugs that, if it is anything like the last one, will single out African-Americans and Latinos although they are not the primary drug users in this country. Last week, Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions put the latest package under the tree: a staffing call for a case on reverse discrimination in college admissions, likely the first step in a federal assault on affirmative action and a determination to hunt for colleges and universities that discriminate against white applicants.
That so many of these policies are based on perception and lies rather than reality is nothing new. White resentment has long thrived on the fantasy of being under siege and having to fight back, as the mass lynchings and destruction of thriving, politically active black communities in Colfax, La. (1873), Wilmington, N.C. (1898), Ocoee, Fla. (1920), and Tulsa, Okla. (1921), attest. White resentment needs the boogeyman of job-taking, maiden-ravaging, tax-evading, criminally inclined others to justify the policies that thwart the upward mobility and success of people of color.
Some conservative angst:
NRO:
Is Mueller’s Grand Jury Impeachment Step One?
It’s a long way from here to there, but don’t be surprised if that’s where we’re headed
Stephen Hayes/Weekly Standard:
Playing Defense
These sorts of fiascos and misadventures began the moment this presidency began, with the new president’s bizarre insistence that his inaugural crowds were larger than Barack Obama’s. Despite majorities in both houses of Congress, his policy agenda is at a standstill. Hundreds of high-level positions throughout the administration remain unfilled. Members of Congress report to us that the president can’t hold a conversation at even a rudimentary level about issues supposedly high on the president’s agenda—tax reform, for instance, and health care. He lies about matters both large and small and is obsessed with perceived slights in the news media.
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
How can Kelly save Trump when he was a human-rights disaster at Homeland Security?
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. The rapid moral deterioration of Homeland Security took place during the six months that John Kelly, the retired Marine general that Trump appointed to run the vast department, was at the helm. He was not a passive conduit just following orders from the White House. He’d teamed up with Attorney General Jeff Sessions in recasting immigrants as criminals — the journey that began with Trump’s famous “Mexican rapists” comment — and joked with the president about using “a saber” on the media, hardly a laughing matter as the administration steps up its war against press freedom. Some Democratic senators quickly came to regret their vote to confirm Kelly at Homeland Security; Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey told the Huffington Post that his “hope that Secretary Kelly would be more evenhanded on enforcement … hasn’t been borne out.”