Miami Herald writer Carl Hiaasen has only written a couple of columns over the last two months. Those who regularly read his column know that’s unusual. But they also knew that there was a very good reason for this time away from the office and that when Hiaasen took the keyboard again it would be with a purpose.
Two months ago, a man with a shotgun walked into the office of a small Maryland newspaper and murdered five people.
The newspaper is the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. Gerald Fischman, the 61-year-old editorial page editor, was one of the shooter’s victims. Another was a longtime sports writer named John McNamara, who was 56. A third was Becky Smith, 34, a sales assistant new to her job.
A fourth victim was Wendi Winters, a popular writer and columnist. She was 65. Survivors said she yelled and ran at the killer, trying to stop him from entering the newsroom. Her actions likely gave several staffers time to hide.
The other name on the list of dead was my only brother Rob, an editor and columnist for the paper. He was 59.
Hiaasen is writing in a time when Donald Trump is declaring journalists—journalists like him, journalists like his brother Rob—“enemies of the people.” And he’s in a state where not only has the current governor been a star performer at multiple NRA conventions, the man who is running to replace him is embracing those same connections.
The Capital Gazette — often just called The Capital — is one of the nation’s oldest papers. In recent days, it has covered the burial of Sen. John McCain at the Naval Academy, a student art contest celebrating the life of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and a deadly wrong-way car accident on Route 50.
I assure you that the reporters and editors who worked on those stories aren’t “enemies of the people.” My brother wasn’t, either.
I’ve read several of Carl Hiaasen’s wry, Florida-drenched novels and dozens of his columns. I wasn’t familiar with the work of his brother. That’s a damn shame.
Rob was murdered on his wife’s birthday. He had placed Maria’s gift on the dining room table before driving to the newsroom for the last time.
Now our family is part of the fast-growing, long-grieving community of those whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. Every spouse, parent, sibling or child of a victim has soul-wrenching stories to tell, like ours, about the beloved and irreplaceable person they’ve lost.
The pain never ebbs. The tears never dry. The awful cosmic questions never get answered.
The Hunt for Read All Over
Leonard Pitts on the easily identifiable qualities of an anonymous writer.
For a man who places such a premium on loyalty, Donald Trump inspires remarkably little.
Bad enough his administration is a sieve, embarrassing accounts of bungled phone calls with foreign leaders and cheeseburger-fueled rants with cronies regularly showing up in the news. Bad enough top aides keep fleeing his White House like it was on fire. Bad enough his ex-lawyer has named him an unindicted conspirator in a campaign finance felony.
Bad enough, all that. Now there’s this.
Meaning, of course, last week’s publication by The New York Times of an anonymous op-ed by a person the paper describes as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” The writer tells us that he or she is part of a large cabal of officials working to subvert some of Trump’s plans and to frustrate his crazier inclinations.
As #TheHuntForReadAllOver roils the White House, never forget — the Nazis who tried to knock off Hilter were still f#cking Nazis. The writer of this anonymous column likes every white nationalist trust-fund baby thing Trump is doing … he just wishes Trump didn’t look so nuts while he’s peddling fascism.
It’s possible to be deeply concerned about that — Just who’s running this country? — and yet, grateful somebody is standing between us and Trump’s meatheaded ideas. And it’s possible to be both those things and yet appalled at this person’s failure to be as large as the crisis demands.
To the contrary, he or she shows the jellyfish spine and bunny rabbit bravery common among Republicans these days. Real courage would’ve required the writer and the “many Trump appointees” he or she says are part of this to quit their jobs en masse, find a public forum and speak the obvious truth without hiding behind the cloak of anonymity. Namely, that this tantrum-throwing child is unfit to govern.
Martin Pengelly isn’t writing an editorial, just reporting on someone who is editorializing.
A bombshell newspaper essay which detailed efforts to sideline Donald Trump from government was “just an obvious attempt to distract attention from this booming economy and [the president’s] record of success”, vice-president Mike Pence has said.
Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday, Pence also denied that White House officials had discussed invoking the 25th amendment and removing Trump from power.
Honestly, my number one suspect on the list of who is behind the op-ed would be … Donald Trump. Not that Trump wrote the essay himself, because that would involve writing. But having the story out there certainly provides Yet Another Distraction and serves the purpose of keeping everything at a high boil. Which is excellent cover for getting things done. Where things means obstructing justice and robbing the nation blind.
Though the author of the New York Times article said there had been discussion of removing the “amoral … impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” Trump from power, he or she also drew attention to administration achievements – Republican goals including “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more”.
If Trump was completely sane, but trying to raise taxes on billionaires … there might be a miracle of spine recovery among Republicans. But nuts is fine. So long as he’s cuckoo for their brand of Cocoa Pops.
David van Drehle lays down a wager.
Bookies set the odds at 12-to-1 that Jared Kushner wrote the “Resistance Inside” bombshell, and if I were a gambling man, I might take a piece of that action. After all, rarely a month has passed during the reign of The Donald without a story leaking about his son-in-law and daughter laboring to curb the excesses of President Daddy. Key themes of the unamed “senior official” in the New York Times — that President Trump is bonkers, and thank heavens for the good guys inside the administration — fit neatly into the same narrative.
Maybe it’s a Dr. Donald, Mr. Trump situation, where Trump’s evil orange alter-ego wrote the essay. Or … maybe not.
The Jared Theory also answers a question so many have asked since the op-ed was published on Wednesday: Why doesn’t this self-styled patriot resign? There’s no leaving for Jared Kushner. As the saying goes: You marry The One, you marry the family. The only clean break from his dilemma is to wake up from a nightmare in June 2015. In that case, he could trip a circuit breaker at Trump Tower and disable the golden escalator on which Trump commenced his historic descent.
Anne Applebaum fires off your reading assignment for the week.
In nations that have known the horror of dictatorship or foreign occupation, there are often long traditions of what Poland’s national poet once called “patriotic treason.” In Polish history, this kind of activity has ranged from armed resistance — in the 19th century against Russian occupation, in the 20th century against the Nazis — to peaceful efforts by bureaucrats who quietly tried to work “within the system” on behalf of their country. I once researched the story of a Polish culture ministry official who churned out Stalinist prose but also used her position, during the years of communist terror, to quietly help dissident artists.
In occupied countries, large public events can spontaneously take on political overtones, too. When the Czech hockey team beat the Soviet Union at the world championships in 1969, one year after the Soviet invasion of the country, half a million people flooded the streets in a celebration that became a show of political defiance. In 1956, 100,000 people came to the reburial of a Hungarian politician who had been murdered following a show trial. The funeral oratory kicked off an anti-communist revolution a few days later.
No, seriously. Go read more.
Brett Kavanaugh
Kathleen Parker reminds you why it’s never worth getting excited by Kathleen Parker.
All we learned from Booker’s Spartacus moment was that he was desperate to wrest the day away from Kavanaugh. Gambling everything, he won a punchline.
Too bad. When you’re already an elected senator, a beneficiary of the most elite education the world has to offer, a charismatic champion of the less fortunate — and a vegan, to boot — you don’t have to invent, embellish or grandstand. Truth is enough.
Parker may lob bombs at Trump now and then, but only because she, like the Times op-ed author, wants the orange one to tone it down so Republicans can stay in control. Otherwise, she’s as reliably right-wing as any columnist writing. See this example where she spends all her time attacking Cory Booker, without ever mentioning that Kavanaugh comitted perjury at multiple points.
Ruth Marcus shows that there’s more than one reason to disqualify Kavanaugh.
Under the unusual circumstances surrounding his selection, Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh should have agreed to recuse himself from deciding cases involving the investigation of President Trump. The reason Kavanaugh asserted at his confirmation hearing for refusing to make such a pledge — that it would violate the imperative of judicial independence — is entirely unconvincing.
In turn, senators should decline to approve Kavanaugh’s nomination unless he does so. And, since that’s not likely to happen, in the event that a case involving the Trump investigation were to come before a Justice Kavanaugh, he should not participate — for his own good and the good of the institution he is poised to join.
Intelligence
John McLaughlin on why intelligence officers are risking everything to speak up.
People frequently ask me why so many former intelligence officers are commenting these days on matters that seem essentially political. The question usually goes “Shouldn’t you stay neutral — above the fray? Isn’t that the tradition for intelligence professionals, both former and still serving?”
The short answer is yes, that is the tradition. Neutrality has certainly been our ethic on political issues, which gave us credibility when we gathered or delivered information that presidents might not want to hear. It goes against every instinct to wade into domestic politics by openly criticizing the president on personal actions or behavior. And make no mistake: Those of us who have chosen to speak out are outside our comfort zones.
McLaughlin notes that these officers are risking not just their own careers, or even just their departments, but the whole future of intelligence in US national security. So … why?
First, we are reacting to today’s extraordinarily unprecedented context, one that transcends traditional party politics. (Most of us have served administrations led by both parties.) For many of us, keeping our mouths shut about what we see in our own country would be akin to not alerting our government to a threat from abroad.
This is your second reading assignment for the morning. Yes, that’s allowed.
Megan McArdle has a column claiming that Nike’s use of Colin Kaepernick in their new ads is a loser.
Because apparently she has numbers from a marketing firm that are much more important than the actual sharp increase in sales for Nike. But McArdle has a bigger point. She wants her poll to trump Nike’s bottom line because …
How nice it would be if the poll is right. Maybe companies would think twice before injecting politics even into people's shopping decisions.
Which is an attitude that people who have power love to project. When your team has control, the last thing they want is “people playing politics.” By which they don’t mean people on their side using that power to enrich themselves or impoverish others. They mean protesting.
The Sadness of the Republican Congress
Dana Milbank on the fall, and further fall, of Paul Ryan.
So this is how retiring House Speaker Paul D. Ryan wishes to leave public service: with lies, name-calling and racism?
Which would make it emblematic of every week since Ryan became speaker.
The fall general-election season has begun, and the $100 million Congressional Leadership Fund, which Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, and his House GOP leadership team endorse and raise money for, has released a flurry of ads in recent days that leave no room for misinterpretation: It intends to make the election a series of personal attacks, largely devoid of policy. …
A racist ad released Wednesday in Upstate New York has doctored images showing Democratic congressional candidate Antonio Delgado, an African American, rapping. It says he has “extreme New York City values” and shows an image of two white people who would pay “higher taxes” if he has his way. “He’s still New York City’s voice, not ours,” it says of Delgado — a Rhodes scholar and Harvard Law School graduate. CLF did this despite complaints about racism in previous versions of the ad.
The sharpest decline over the last year has been in the sale of dogwhistles. No one uses them anymore.
Election Security
The Washington Post on the failure to address real concerns over election security.
AS THE midterm elections approach, one thing is clear: Neither the Trump administration nor Congress has done enough to deter Russia and other hostile foreign powers from interfering in the U.S. democratic process. That is despite the Kremlin’s clear record of meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and despite consistent warnings from intelligence professionals and other experts that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to continue his influence campaigns. Too much of the conversation has so far focused on defending the nation from attacks with better cybersecurity and election technologies. That is needed. But a more potent strategy would convince Mr. Putin and others that the consequences of even trying to penetrate American defenses are too grave to risk.