If you’re up for arrival of APR this morning, this is a good time to turn on that TV, or open a new tab, because in just a few minutes, something genuinely unique is going to happen.
Assuming all goes as planned on Sunday morning, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will make a deorbit burn at 7:23 AM ET that will bring it back down to Earth a few minutes before 8AM ET. Since this is the first reentry and first landing for Starliner, that’s pretty important all on its own. But what should make it particularly interesting is that the craft is expected to parachute down into the New Mexico desert near White Sands Proving Grounds, a part of which has now been renamed “White Sands Space Harbor.” This is the first time that a spacecraft designed to carry people will return from space and parachute onto U.S. soil. Though Russian Soyuz capsules routinely land on the steppes, previous American capsules like Gemini and Apollo, as well as the SpaceX Crew Dragon craft, all make “splash downs” on their return. Starliner will come down with a combination of parachutes and airbags for a soft impact on terra firma.
Starliner’s launch on Friday wasn’t without issues. The spacecraft was supposed to go on to spend some time docked with the International Space Station, but an problem with timing apparently caused a critical burn to be missed. So Boeing and NASA instead sent Starliner looping around Earth for 48 hours, both to collect additional data on how the craft behaves in space, and to show that, had their been crew on board, they would still have come home safely.
Okay, that’s all the good space-related news. But … in the much less “we came in peace” section of the sky, multiple sources are reporting that North Korea is on the brink of another rocket launch. And while Donald Trump has been able to wave away the last dozen or more launches as “small,” this one looks to be anything but. Instead it looks like Kim Jung un is preparing to let fly an ICBM with a greater range than any that his nations has launched before. One that could, theoretically at least, deliver a weapon almost anywhere in the United States.
On Thursday, the 38 North team at the Stimson Center noted activity at the Sohae Satellite Launch Facility, but as of that date, North Korea hadn't done some of the housecleaning steps that usually come before a launch. Still, The New York Times is reporting that U.S. intelligence has their eyes glued to the situation, with a “Christmas present” expected from Pyongyang. Despite Trump tweeting that there was “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” following his meeting with Kim in Singapore, North Korea has continued to advance both the capability of their delivery systems and their stockpile of weapons. Estimates indicate North Korea now has around 38 nuclear bombs—more than double what it was thought to have a year ago.
But hey, Sohae isn’t called a satellite launch facility for nothing. Kim might decide to just launch a plain old satellite. One that would orbit around and around and definitely not be filled with bombs. That should make everyone feel so much safer.
In any case, let’s go see which pundits are still at their desk this almost-Christmas-weekend.
Jonathan Chait on Trump’s circular arrangement with Vladimir Putin
New York Magazine
President Trump has fixated on a theory that Ukraine stole Democratic emails in 2016 and framed Russia for the crime. The Washington Post reports that Trump told a former senior White House official that he believed Ukraine stole the emails because “Putin told me.”
The Post’s explosive report adds to an extensive body of evidence showing the degree to which Vladimir Putin has influenced Trump’s thinking. Trump is not a Russian agent, but he is a man whose thinking has obviously been heavily influenced by Russian sources. It is difficult if not impossible to find another Republican official at any level who believes, like Trump, that Montenegro is an aggressive country that might attack Russia or that the Soviets were forced to invade Afghanistan as a defense against terrorist attacks.
Oh, so not true. Just ask a Republican. For fun, ask them the question first, then remind them of what Trump said, then ask again. Yeah, pretty fun, heh?
The Ukraine-server theory has gained somewhat wider currency in Republican circles, in large part because of Trump. The Mueller investigation found that Paul Manafort — the Trump campaign manager who had previously been hired by a Russian oligarch to help a pro-Russian presidential candidate in Ukraine — had suggested even during the campaign that Ukraine had stolen the emails to blame Russia. Manafort was working at the time alongside Konstantin Kilimnik, whom U.S. intelligence considers a Russian intelligence asset.
The Ukraine server theory requires that Hillary Clinton convinced Ukrainian hackers to break into the DNC, steal, and distribute emails that damaged her candidacy — including handing them out just as the Democratic convention was getting underway for maximum disruption. All of this, so that Hillary could set up Trump for an impeachment three years into his term after she lost. Because Hillary Clinton is the only person who thought Hillary Clinton was going to lose. Plus, she has time travel.
Putin tells Trump, Trump tells Republicans, Republicans repeat Trump. Also, Trump tells Barr and Barr goes around the world embarrassing the United States by repeating Putin’s claims to our allies. This is how the world works now.
Will Bunch decided he needed to be there in person to see Trump impeached.
Philadelphia Inquirer
At age 60, this history buff has been either lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it, to have lived through three of the four meaningful impeachment pushes in America’s 243-year history. I’m also praying that this will be the last — so this time I wanted to be on Capitol Hill, to inhale the same momentous air.
Somehow, the weather gods created a day that felt perfect for impeaching a president. The mid-December sun was blindingly bright, blasting through the raw autumn gloom that had hung over much of America for days. But the wind was crisp and bracing, an icy wake-up call for a nation addicted to bamboozlement to rise up and finally face reality.
Maybe what Trump voters needs is a kind of ice-water challenge. Something to wake them up long enough to notice the crimes.
Even with real-feel temperatures in the 20s, hundreds had crowded by 9 a.m. into a small park in the shadow of the Capitol — to rally not for a tax cut or to end an unpopular war but for the more abstract democratic principles that have kept America a republic for more than two centuries. They chanted loudly, “No one is above the law!”
I only wish it had been hundreds … of thousands.
Virginia Heffernan on Trump’s screaming screed of a letter.
Los Angeles Times
Read the Tuesday letter, and it’s clear: Trump is scared as hell. And scared people are scary.
Pelosi has signaled since September that the House is committed to a methodical impeachment process. But in spite of her prudence during the impeachment inquiry, Trump sees in her every kind of bellicosity. In the letter, the president charges her with “a full-fledged case” of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Likewise the Poe narrator imagines his placid, sleeping victim is deranged. He perceives an “overcharged” soul in the sleeping man’s snores. He believes he can hear the man’s heart beating and decides it’s a symptom of the man’s fear — and not his own.
Oh, projectors.
Trump solicited foreign intervention in the upcoming 2020 election, and multiple former federal prosecutors agree that he should be indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice. So Trump, as usual, offloads these facts onto Pelosi and the Democrats: “You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice.”
Heffernan is one of my favorites and this is just a middle-chunk out of a good column that has quite a bit more Poe-related analogies. So go read it. If you’ve been missing Heffernan from the pages (pages? Are their pages?) of the APR lately, it’s because the LA Times adopted a layout on their editorial page that left the columnist’s names off the columns. Yeah, brilliant idea. I got tired of fighting my way through “nope, that’s not it” to find Heffernan’s weekly piece and just stopped looking for awhile. But I’m glad to see that someone seems to have noticed that not being able to find columns by the author was pretty sorry planning.
Nancy LeTourneau is a lot happier about Christianity Today than Donald Trump.
Washington Monthly
Whether a call like this opens up a fissure in Trump’s base of support among white evangelicals remains to be seen. But it represents a crack that, as Leonard Cohen wrote, allows some light to get in. It is precisely the kind of thing that can spread a bit of cognitive dissonance among those who have been attempting to avoid the difficult questions raised by blind support of a president who is clearly amoral.
Keep in mind that this news comes only a few weeks after Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, talked with radio host Eric Metaxas about how those who oppose Donald Trump are engaging with demonic forces. When a publication like Christianity Today joins the opposition, it becomes more difficult to literally “demonize” the other side.
In response to this call for Trump’s removal, Franklin Graham has weighed in to define the battle lines. In a post on Facebook, he begins by suggesting that his late father voted for Trump and would disagree with what Galli wrote. Graham doesn’t mount a defense of the president, but simply dismisses the charges against him as partisan.
But watch now as Franklin Graham invents a whole new religious movement based on nothing but his own reaction to a single article.
Here is how Graham ended his response.
Christianity Today has been used by the left for their political agenda. It’s obvious that Christianity Today has moved to the left and is representing the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism.
The elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism. Well … howdy. I hope those folks start getting all evangelical about that.
Art Cullen says the impeachment fall-out in the Midwest might not be what Republicans expect.
Storm Lake Times
Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley can be counted on to follow orders from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Then there will be a general election in November.
Ernst will face a challenge from one of four worthy Democratic opponents: Michael Franken, Kimberly Graham, Theresa Greenfield or Eddie Mauro. The challenger will ask why she defended the most corrupt President in American history. They will ask why she absolved Trump selling out our national security interests with Ukraine to cook up a phony investigation aimed at Joe Biden. They will show pictures of Ernst kissing and hugging the Fearless Leader. They will present her with facts about how Trump’s trade wars are choking farmers and idling manufacturing workers while she stood aside. They will ask about what Ernst did to prevent Trump from throttling the biofuels industry.
Rep. Steve King, who was stripped of his Judiciary Committee seat by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for King’s blatant racism, will be asked the same questions, assuming he wins a June primary, by Democrat JD Scholten. King and Ernst also will be asked whether they think it is moral and right to separate families and hold refugee children in cages, or leave them drowning face down in the Rio Grande.
Man, let us hope these are exactly the thoughts of Iowa voters. Because if they are, more places than Iowa are going to be going blue.
Charles Pierce and … an article you need to read, title and all.
Esquire
As you may have noticed, the shebeen has been disarranged for the past couple of weeks. The sudden intervention of an automobile into my affairs—and, it must be said, into my lower back—has kept me watching the considerable landfill of recent news from the sidelines—often, I must admit, severely hopped up on goofballs, as Joe Friday would have said. (I got a small glimpse of the opioid crisis from the inside and, let me tell you, the other day, the oxy was whispering to me the way Richard Pryor’s crack pipe used to talk to him. Motherfcker is strong, Jack.)
I am one lucky motherfcker, I’ll tell you that. If I had bounced another foot, I would have bounced into oncoming traffic, which would have complicated matters considerably. My head landed hard, but it landed in a snowbank, which not only cushioned the blow but slowed the bleeding. I was one lucky motherfcker because of the people who surrounded me while I was on the road. The first-aid worker who was first on the scene and called my wife. The nurse who had just come off an overnight shift and who apparently left all the fcks she had to give back in her work locker. Some idiot started honking his horn to get around the scene, and she took a bit of time out to yell, in a wicked pissah Boston accent, “Will you shut the fuck up, you arsehole!” at him. Nurses, man. They could take over the world in an hour.
I’m so oblivious that, while I realized Pierce had been missing for a few weeks, I put it down first to a vacation, then, after seeing something about his recovery, assumed he had been ill. Somehow I managed to miss the whole run over by a car thing.
And it wasn’t just Pierce who was lucky. It was all of us who love to read his work.
Joan Walsh scores the last Democratic debate of the year.
The Nation
Senator Amy Klobuchar won the last debate of 2019. What does that mean for 2020?
Sure, lots of mainstream media called it for former vice president Joe Biden, who definitely had his best night. But that’s different from winning. You learn early in pundit school (it’s nonexistent, but you watch and “learn”) that if a front-runner doesn’t lose a debate, they win. So a lot of pundits said Biden won.
But in a chaotic time like this, that’s just dumb. Biden had some good moments and no bad ones—unlike other Biden debates—but Klobuchar dominated at times when other candidates seemed about to come out on top. And that’s what makes a debate winner.
The Minnesota senator broke through by decrying the tenacious and almost tedious onstage infighting going on among her rivals. I thought Senator Elizabeth Warren was about to knock out Mayor Pete Buttigieg, attacking him for charging thousands for selfies (when she does them for free) and holding fundraisers with the wealthiest—including one in a wine cave that fascinated Political Twitter.
I don’t think I watched the same debate as Walsh. While I agree that Buttigieg came in last, failing to really come out the winner in any of several bruising exchanges, I didn’t see Klobuchar as the night’s big winner by any means. Especially since Klobuchar demonstrated what was to me a really irritating habit of stepping in to play “mom” when other people were arguing, but deliberately picking fights of her own. For example, just as Walsh states, Klobuchar cut off Warren in her argument over funding. But ten minutes later, Klobuchar completely ignored the question she was asked to launch an attack over Buttigieg’s lack of experience. That inconsistency was not a good look for me.
Michael Tomasky on just how much Trump deserved impeachment.
Daily Beast
If we had a serious Republican Party, all this would have happened long ago; there would have been several impeachment counts, and perhaps a quarter or so of House Republicans would have joined the Democrats in voting to pass the articles Trump has so obviously earned.
And, if we had a serious Republican Party, the extent of Trump’s high crimes would be made manifestly clear on a bipartisan (enough) basis to the three audiences that matter in a moment like this: the American people, the world, and history. He would either have been convicted in the Senate or, like Richard Nixon, saved the embarrassment of conviction by old-bull members of his own party who went to the White House and told him the gig was up. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott, a Pennsylvania moderate, did that for Nixon. In our time, if sanity still prevailed, it might have been Orrin Hatch and Lindsey Graham. But Hatch has stayed silent, and Graham, well, you know about him.
The way that time was allocated in the House shows what kind of Republican Party this is. The kind where experienced former members of leadership were allocated thirty-seconds to bark out something in the middle of the day, and the largest chunks of time went to Mark Meadows, Devin Nunes, and a Kevin McCarthy who came off as either drugged or simply three miles up his own ass.
Jeff Flake demonstrating once again that only ex-Republican senators are allowed to think.
Washington Post
To my former Senate Republican colleagues,
I don’t envy you.
It might not be fair, but none of the successes, achievements and triumphs you’ve had in public office — whatever bills you’ve passed, hearings you’ve chaired, constituents you have had the privilege of helping — will matter more than your actions in the coming months.
President Trump is on trial. But in a very real sense, so are you. And so is the political party to which we belong.
As we approach the time when you do your constitutional duty and weigh the evidence arrayed against the president, I urge you to remember who we are when we are at our best. And I ask you to remember yourself at your most idealistic.
The scary thing is … for most of them this is their best and most idealistic. They came to have fame, power, and make money. All Trump demands to keep getting those things is obedience. There seems to be no evidence that a single Republican is weighing up risking that sure thing.
There’s quite a bit more from Flake. You can just imagine how effective it will be.
A bit of a closing note today. Next week looks to be my last week writing Sunday APR after … it’s been awhile. I made that threat and / or promise several months ago, and I intend to follow through. What happens after that? Tune in next week, and we’ll talk about it.
Also, I’ll be dialing in for NASA’s post-landing news conference. There’s no guarantee I’ll get a chance to ask a question, but if you have something you’re dying to ask NASA director Jim Bridenstine, the Boeing Starliner team, or the trio of astronauts designated to fly on the craft next year, drop it in comments.