This is my favorite thing. Over the holidays I wrote about the joy I get out of the opportunity to write non-breaking news “evergreen” pieces to be slotted in on days with skimpy news and even skimpier staffs. But the truth is, I’ve treated every Sunday morning pretty much like a evergreen-opportunity every week since I started doing this in, lo, the Middle Cretaceous. I’ve welcomed the top section of each APR as a chance to write about climate stuff, and science stuff, and all those things I’d like to subject everyone to during the week, if it weren’t for hearings and subpoenas and … news.
Once upon a time I even used Sunday morning APR to start a series of speculations about “utopia.” But that was in that halcyon year of 1 BT, when it seemed like we’d all be spending the next four years arguing over how fast we moved to a $15 minimum wage, how best to support the Paris agreement, and whether it was worth rolling out a public option before going onto some inevitable form of single payer. It’s not so much that those were simpler times, as that they were times before the daily news began to resemble what might result from taking bad mushrooms while watching grainy tapes of the Banana Splits accompanied by an endless loop of War Pigs and Tubular Bells. Oh, and I think I may have spent one Sunday morning talking about mushrooms.
In short, I have treated your early Sunday AM as a playground, confident that by the time you pried your eyes open long enough to read full sentences, you’d be too fixated on your French press or paperless pour over system to make a formal complaint. And as a result of all that playing, I think that Sunday morning APR has, on a fairly regular basis, been the best thing I’ve written all week. Some of these little opening monologues have gone on to be expanded into longer articles at a later date, but most of them have appeared nowhere else but in this free-form space, hanging out here before I get down to serious business of critiquing my betters.
That second half of APR is also kind of a blast. I spend less than half an hour reading through, selecting chunks from, commenting on, and complaining about, a piece written by someone whose accomplishments include, at a minimum, securing a regular spot in a major national paper. Most of them have at least one Pulitzer on a shelf somewhere. What better job could there be them sitting back and taking potshots at these guys? But … this is it. This is the Sunday morning APR that comes after the penultimate Sunday morning APR. This is where I turn in my semi-poison pen. From now on, it’s someone else’s job to keep your screens free from George Will, Ross Douthat, and the whole list of writers who have earned banishment from Sunday APR over the years.
What happens now is … well, something different. Because Sundays now are not like they were when I started doing this little check to see if Maureen Dowd was still auditioning for Mean Girls III (Spoiler: She is.). The big difference is that there are now three (count ‘em) genuine Daily Kos staff writers who work on Sundays. Not so long ago, we lived on a planet where politicians “dumped” news on Fridays, confident that the worst sins would be forgotten by the time reporters sharpened a pencil on Monday morning. Now the crap rains down 24/7, and there’s little choice but to raise the news-brella round the clock. So, in addition to the regular weekly parade of longer articles, expect your Sundays to include more fresh off the presses news. And no, we don’t actually have presses. So far as I know.
Before I close out, I’d like to issue a huge thanks, and equally huge apologies, to Greg Dworkin. The good doctor’s work in starting and maintaining APR over the years has been tremendous. Tremendous plus. There’s never been a week when he wasn’t willing to step in for someone who had to step out, despite shouldering a load that’s enough for a whole team all by himself. I feel like I’m not just letting down the side, but very specifically letting down Dr. Greg in letting this go.
1) Thank you. 2) I’m sorry. 3) Go to 1.
And finally, if APR has seen some of my best writing over the years, that’s in large part because it’s also home to my favorite audience. More so than anywhere else on Daily Kos, APR isn’t just read by an assortment of those who happened to click on an article. Those who read and comment here are as much a regular crew as the people writing the columns. In fact, it’s the one place each week where I never, ever fail to read the comments. Because they’re so damn good.
Okay, one last time. Let’s do pundits.
Jonathan Chait wants to know if the left can really do better than Obama.
New York Magazine
The Obama era produced the most sweeping combination of social reforms, economic rescue, and regulation of any presidency in half a century. For that reason, the left finds it necessary to transform Obama’s successes into failures — if Obama’s methods made the world a better place, they can be replicated, but if they failed, the only alternative is either reaction or a Sandersian political revolution. The left-wing New Republic has a new series of pieces repeating what is now a familiar indictment of Obama liberalism: “The Collapse of Neoliberalism,” by Ganesh Sitaraman, “A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure,” by Alex Pareene, and “The Hell That Was Health-Care Reform,” by Libby Watson.
The New Republic makes a living, such as it is, by wallowing in a kind of anticipatory doubt and defeatism that makes The Sun Also Rises seem cheery and hopeful. It’s the place to go if you’re convinced that things were terrible, are terrible, and can’t get better. The case that they’re trying to make here is not just that Barack Obama didn’t really do much, but that liberalism can’t do much.
It should be no secret to anyone that Obama is a brilliant, thoughtful, caring, intensely likable man who generated a unique moment of optimism and hope. And he’s also a miserable politician who either lacked a plan, or the desire, to leave behind the kind of party and infrastructure that could protect and build on his genuine accomplishments—and yes, that is also part of the job assignment. But that’s only a fraction of the argument being made in TNR.
It is obviously true that Obama’s success was tempered both by sometimes flawed decisions and, to a much greater degree, the system’s limited ability to bear change. Many of Obama’s most successful measures were designed to set the stage for expansion and improvement later on. No reforms in American history, from emancipation to the New Deal, have yielded uncomplicated triumph. Viewed up close, they are all the same grueling half-measures weighed down by compromises with odious forces, and all had to survive right-wing backlash that denied anything that felt like “victory.”
There are surely cautionary tales to be drawn from Obama’s experience. But in its haste to bury both Obama and liberalism, TNR’s authors downplay the scope of his success. (While understandably short of comprehensive, their assessment completely omits such enormous reforms as the bank rescue, auto bailout, green-energy subsidies, energy-efficiency and pollution regulations, DACA, the Iran nuclear deal, the Cuba opening, and ending the ban on gays in the military.) Most important, they barely acknowledge, and utterly refuse to grapple with, the barriers Obama and his allies had to overcome.
The New Republic’s argument here is really just one rather perfunctory portion of a whole wave of ooh wee, them Democrats better get rid of those liberals while they still can. Because only conservatives can win. Which is an argument best described is stupid. Also wrong. But mostly stupid.
By the way, one thing that’s happened over the last two years is that I’ve gone from disagreeing with Jonathan Chait 80% of the time, to agreeing with him at least two-thirds of the time. Clearly Chait has gotten smarter.
Nancy LeTourneau on how we have never been at war with Eastasia.
Washington Monthly
The election of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president in 2000 came on the heels of a massive privatization of state-owned assets that began in the 1990s and created a group of wealthy oligarchs who basically ran the country. American capitalists, like Bush, applauded those efforts. To solidify his position, Putin made a grand bargain with the oligarchs in which he allowed them to maintain their power in exchange for support of his government. People like Hillary Clinton saw beyond the capitalist/communist framework and recognized that it was the authoritarianism that persisted, despite the changes.
Just want to interject here, because I can’t clip the whole darn thing, that what LeTourneuau is pointing out with this piece is that, when people—meaning Republicans—extract a single line about the “reset” of U.S.—Russian policy, and then act as if that means that Obama and Hillary Clinton were colluding with Putin, it requires ignoring what was really happening, and what was really accomplished.
By 2008, Putin had served two terms as Russia’s president and was barred by the constitution from running again. So shortly before Obama’s inauguration, Dmitry Medvedev was elected. That is what triggered the launch of the “reset.” By 2010, the U.S. and Russia had signed a New START treaty that reduced nuclear arsenals and Russia had joined Obama’s initiative to impose world-wide sanctions on Iran—which eventually led to the Iran nuclear weapons agreement. There were other areas of cooperation, including U.S. efforts to secure Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization.
Putin was planning to run for president once again in 2012 when his party, United Russia, barely retained control of the Duma in parliamentary elections in 2011 that independent monitoring groups described as fraudulent. In response, thousands of Russians took to the streets in protest. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said, “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted. And that means they deserve fair, free, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.”
But what Trump, and other Republicans, extract from all this is just a few “punch lines” designed to make it seem that Obama was far more friendly to Putin than in reality. It’s very much along the same lines as the pretense that Obama took a harder line on Ukraine than Trump, while ignoring that Obama did so when Ukraine was controlled by a pro-Russian government helped into place by Paul Manafort. Go read it all.
Charles Pierce on how Trump intends to make a war criminal into a star.
Esquire
... this New York Times account in which other SEALs who served with the now-pardoned Edward Gallagher express their horror at what Gallagher did to deserve the punishment from which El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago has delivered him. It’s not so much Gallagher’s crimes in uniform that’s so shocking today; those events have been well-known for a while. Rather, what is flatly terrifying in its implications is the reaction of the other SEALS to Gallagher’s pardon.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment. “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First C
Trump spent the 2016 convention attacking Gold Star families and POWs. But then, the whole GOP spent the 2004 election making fun of a guy who earned a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. When laughing at those who have behaved honorably and scored genuine achievements is part of the standard operating environment, holding up monsters as examples seems like not even the next step.
Make no mistake. Edward Gallagher is going to be a star of the upcoming Republican presidential campaign. ... I make him even money to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention. Edward Gallagher is going to be the symbol of the U.S. military and there’s nobody in the GOP who can stop this from happening.
Of course, those people who champion Gallagher also think that what happened at Abu Ghraib is just peachy, torture is effective, and soldiers shouldn’t be happened by rules of engagement designed to protect civilians. Those people in this case being Trump supporters.
Michael Tomasky asks if Republicans have misplaced their minds or their spines.
Daily Beast
Jeff Flake is at it again. The former Arizona GOP senator, famous for criticizing Donald Trump and then blowing town rather than staying and fighting, had an oped in The Washington Post over the weekend challenging his former colleagues: “My simple test for all of us: What if President Barack Obama had engaged in precisely the same behavior? I know the answer to that question with certainty, and so do you. You would have understood with striking clarity the threat it posed, and you would have known exactly what to do.”
Though my admiration for Flake has its limits because he threw in the towel, he’s dead right about his former colleagues. Of course they’d be howling at the moon if Obama had done the same thing.
But of course, Republicans don’t see Flake as a role model or a thought leader. They see him, like Justin Amash, as an object lesson: Go against Trump and lose.
The thing is that they are almost certainly right. Donald Trump has been very, very effective in making certain that there is not the least bit of difference between the cult of Trump and the Republican Party. Trump has genuinely put himself out there again and again, pitting his popularity against that of representatives and senators, confident in the fact that, no matter how secure a Republican seat may seem, none of them are so secure that they feel willing to withstand years of daily attacks, visits from “very fine people,” and starvation from a funding apparatus that has been whole subsumed by Trump’s campaign. In the modern Republican Party, Trump may not be pick a candidate and make him win. But he can absolutely pick a candidate and make him lose.
But about his most widely quoted assertion, made not in this column but earlier, that if the vote to convict were private he thinks 30 GOP senators would choose to remove Trump, I think he’s dead wrong. These people are crazies or cowards or both, and they’re as locked into Trump at this point as those brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate were to Raymond Shaw. Except these senator-soldiers weren’t brainwashed by the North Koreans. They’ve brainwashed themselves.
It now appears there may not even be a trial, or there’ll be one and it will last about an hour before every single Republican votes to acquit Trump. Some will do so proudly and stand there and lecture us about the Constitution even as they take a piss on it (Lindsey Graham); some will run for the elevators (Susan Collins). And most will just hop on the Senate subway back to their office and relative obscurity. How’s Jim Risch going to vote? John Barrasso? Mike Braun? John Hoeven? Who cares?
The role model of the Trump Republican Party isn’t John McCain, it’s Don Young. And who is Don Young? Why, only the longest serving Republican member in Congress. Young has been serving for 47 years, uninterrupted. In that time, he has … well, he’s survived several investigations for bribes and ethical violations. In one of which he was defended by Robert Mueller. Other than that, Young is known for … serving 47 years uninterrupted. Before Trump was elected, Young said he was supported by "a bunch of idiots following a pied piper over the edge of the cliff!" Guess what Young says now? Whatever Trump wants, that’s what he says. After all, Young is only 86. He wouldn’t want to say anything that would risk his reelection.
Rather inconveniently for me, this is one of those weeks where most of the APR regulars are off. So this is not just a last Sunday APR for me, but also an extra-abbreviated APR. However, just because there is no Leonard Pitts column this week, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go read Leonard Pitts. Or that you’re allowed to stop a weekly Pitts-stop when I’m gone.
Over at The Washington Post this morning, it’s time for those “best of...” columns. That includes their view of the best op-eds that ran in the Post over the last twelve months. There’s also a selection of the best Tom Toles cartoons of the year that’s definitely worth a visit.
Looking at both The Washington Post and The New York Times this Sunday is a reminder of just how consistently these major papers have “added conservatives voices” to their opinion pages, out of some strange sense that what their papers need are more lies. On this Sunday alone, the Post includes Megan McArdle grossly misrepresenting the economy, Marc Thiessen telling Americans how thankful they should be for Trump’s achievements, Hugh Hewitt telling Christians that Trump is the only thing saving their religious freedoms, and George Will … nope, even now I am not going to look. At least it doesn’t seem that either outlet has completely outsourced the entire editorial page to the nearest pile of Trump voters extracted from a rust-belt diner. This week.
If there’s one thing that I’m not going to miss, it’s how major papers have so willingly turned their editorial pages into a safe haven for statements that completely ignore the news appearing on their other pages.
Okay, now I’m just dragging this thing out. It’s time to put this column, and myself, to bed. See you in the comments.