Fahoo Fores Dahoo Dores
Welcome Christmas,
Christmas Day!
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was first adapted as an animated special in 1966, making this the 50th anniversary of that best of all holiday specials. I know some people have a fondness for the round-headed kid, and others find that picked-upon reindeer sympathetic, but you can keep all the rest. It’s not Christmas until Max comes down from Mount Crumpit and Cindy Lou Who gets that roast beast.
The animated version of the Grinch — and repeat after me: there is no other film version — has everything going for it. There’s the unmatched plumy purr of 78-year-old Boris Karloff providing both the narration and the voice of the titular green meanie. There’s Thurl Ravenscroft’s basso profundo rumble powering through the most delightful lyrics ever in You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. There’s even June Foray, the voice of Rocket J. Squirrel and Natasha Fatale, doing an uncredited turn as Cindy Lou (Foray, at age 99, is still around, thumbing her nose at 2016). Above all, there’s the genius of Chuck Jones, the man behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and just about any other cartoon that you ever loved.
And of course, there’s Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel’s lovely rhyming tale of a hard-hearted character saved, not by a visit from assorted spirits, but just from witnessing the good people of Whoville coming together to celebrate … coming together. Add a coda of unquestioned forgiveness, and it’s the perfect Christmas tale.
This year has been utterly crushing. Whether your dreams were perched at the top of the mountain in November, or you’d already been sidelined to a more modest hill, we’re all alike now. We watched that sled go over, carrying hope down to whatever fate waits on the far side of that jagged peak. Max was not able to arrest the slide this year. The Grinch remained as cardiac-challenged as ever. And I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. All the Tar Tinkers and Flu Floopers … they’re gone. They’re just gone.
But we’re not.
Christmas Day is in our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp.
Christmas Day will always be just as long as we have we.
Welcome, Christmas, while we stand... heart to heart... and hand in hand.
Come on in. Let’s read some pundits.
Catherine Rampell on why Democrats should not make a big shift in their platform.
Why did all those Economically Anxious™ Trump voters reject policies that would have helped relieve their economic anxiety?
Maybe they believed any Big Government expansions would disproportionately go to the “wrong” kinds of people — that is, people unlike themselves.
They already think that those “wrong” kinds of people are getting everything, and no facts demonstrating otherwise are believed.
There seems to be universal agreement, at least among the Democratic politicians and strategists I’ve interviewed, that the party’s actual ideas are the right ones.
Democrats, they note, pushed for expansion of health-insurance subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans; investments in education and retraining; middle-class tax cuts; and a higher minimum wage. These are core, standard-of-living improving policies. They would do far more to help the economically precarious — including and especially white working-class voters — than Donald Trump’s top-heavy tax cuts and trade wars ever could.
Here’s the problem. These Democratic policies probably would help the white working class. But the white working class doesn’t seem to buy that they’re the ones who’d really benefit.
The idea that Democrats need to drop “identity politics” and reach out to the (white) working class is bass-ackwards. Democrats did reach out to the (white) working class. But the white working class was busy playing identity politics.
Read all of this. A bookmark wouldn’t hurt.
Adam Schiff and Jane Harman demand that Congress take action on the Russian subversion of our election
Russia’s theft and strategic leaking of emails and documents from the Democratic Party and other officials present a challenge to the U.S. political system unlike anything we’ve experienced. In October, when Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declared that the intelligence community was confident that Russia was responsible for hacking and dumping material and that such activities could only have been authorized by Russia’s senior-most officials, he was describing a modern-day Watergate break-in, but one that was carried out by a foreign adversary through cyber means.
Watergate is the right analogy. The difference is that Richard Nixon wasn’t on TV bragging about it, or asking the burglars to break into a few more offices while they were at it.
The unprecedented interference in our election is disturbing enough, but the damage to our democratic system was compounded by campaign rhetoric calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. Continued dismissals of the intelligence community’s consensus view that the most senior levels of the Russian government directed the attacks undermine those in the best position to prevent and disrupt further problems.
Upton Sinclair wrote that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In Donald Trump’s case, both the legitimacy of his presidency and the security of his large financial connections to Russia depend on his at least pretending to not understand the extraordinary nature of what was done to secure his win.
Dana Milbank on Trump’s express route to getting around legal issues.
Trump lieutenant Newt Gingrich this week proposed an elegant solution for all the conflicts of interest swirling around the president-elect and his team of billionaires: Ignore the law.
President-elect Donald Trump, Gingrich said, should let those in his administration do as they wish with their personal fortunes and business interests and pardon them if they are found to have violated laws against using public office for personal enrichment. “He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers, I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules, period’,” Gingrich said on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” on Monday.
It’s interesting to speculate about just how far Gingrich’s vision of Trump-metheus Unbound extends. Can the wand be waved over bribery? Murder? Treason? The actual answer is, of course, of course.
Abraham Lincoln as a young lawyer in Illinois in 1838 warned that disregard for laws would leave the United States vulnerable to its own Caesar or Napoleon.
“I know the American people are much attached to their government,” Lincoln said then. “Yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded . . . the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural consequence.”
Trump repeatedly stated, falsely, that Hillary Clinton benefited from a different set of laws than those faced by ordinary people. That’s not true for Trump — he has no laws.
The New York Times and an empty chair.
Soon after his inauguration next month, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate someone to the Supreme Court, which has been hamstrung by a vacancy since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. There will be public debates about the nominee’s credentials, past record, judicial philosophy and temperament. There will be Senate hearings and a vote.
No matter how it plays out, Americans must remember one thing above all: The person who gets confirmed will sit in a stolen seat.
Anyone think that if Republicans were in the position Democrats now find themselves in, they would not press to seat their candidate for the Court via any means? Anyone?
It was stolen from Barack Obama, a twice-elected president who fulfilled his constitutional duty more than nine months ago by nominating Merrick Garland, a highly qualified and widely respected federal appellate judge.
Republicans stole it, wrapped it up for Trump, and are ecstatic with their gift. There’s no point in trying to make them feel guilty, because they don’t feel guilt.
John McCain on Syria after Aleppo.
“Should we really accept the notion that the world is powerless in the face of a Rwanda, or Srebrenica?” the president asked the U.N. General Assembly in 2013. “If that’s the world that people want to live in, they should say so, and reckon with the cold logic of mass graves.”
That reckoning is now upon us. The mass graves are before us, and the name Aleppo will echo through history, like Srebrenica and Rwanda, as a testament to our moral failure and everlasting shame. Even in a conflict that has killed nearly 500,000 people, driven half of Syria’s population from their homes, created the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II and spawned the terrorist army of the Islamic State — even amid all this horror and depravity, Aleppo stands out.
Aleppo may be lost, but the war in Syria is far from over. It will likely get worse as the Assad regime, Iran, Russia, Turkey, the Kurds, the Gulf states and others intensify their fighting over what is left of Syria’s carcass.
I don’t have a good answer. There isn’t a good answer. If America hadn’t already plunged into both Afghanistan and Iraq, would there be a different reaction to the idea of going into Syria? Probably. But then, there would also be a different Syria. So “what if” games are worthless.
All that matters is “what now.”
Lucia Graves on how Trump has already stepped into the role of permanent divider-in-chief
In the wee morning hours following the election, in the decked-out ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, Donald Trump memorably proclaimed he would be the “president for all Americans”. It was a remarkable claim for a man who’d run a campaign mired in bigotry and xenophobia. …
Since becoming president-elect, Trump has called for the mass deportation of immigrants. He’s also selected a cabinet that is mostly white, mostly male, and mostly business leaders – in other words, a cabinet that looks a whole lot like him.
That’s not populism; it’s cronyism. And it’s proliferating, even before inauguration day.
It was never populism. Not everyone who claims to be running against the entrenched politicians, and who can whip up a crowd, is running a populist campaign. If “alt-right” was the term that white nationalists invented to tug some nice chinos down over their jackboots, “populist” was the term the press used for the last year because they’re scared out of their wits by the F-word.
Anne Perkins on how someone who has knowledge of that word is fighting against it
Merkel has established herself as the best and strongest voice of the values of a liberal Europe, and her steadfastness under pressure – at least her rhetorical steadfastness, for her policies have been modified to accommodate some of her critics’ concerns – is a beacon in a continent that is increasingly inward turning, nativist and afraid.
It may seem strange that the world is hanging onto civility, to the light of liberal democracy that saw us through the best decades in history, by a German thread. But it’s not irony. It’s experience.
Every time she stands up for what postwar Europe represents, she consolidates Germany’s rebirth. …
Only months earlier, the Greeks had portrayed Merkel in a stormtrooper helmet. In September she seemed to banish the faint but lingering stench of 20th-century history for good. In its place came what Merkel called Germany’s “friendly, beautiful face”.
It’s going to take many, many acts of kindness, and many, many years of intelligent, thoughtful behavior to wipe the Trump off America. Let’s just hope we can get started soon.
Bruce Handy argues for another Christmas song as the official tune of the season.
Introducing the song, Ms. Russell mentioned that she was going to use its seldom-sung original lyrics, and indeed they proved not only unfamiliar but also — surprising in this generally jolly context — provocative.
The most common version of the song begins:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
Instead, Ms. Russell sang:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past
That’s not just melancholy or bittersweet; that’s bleak, more “A Raymond Carver Christmas” than “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Sure, it’s dark (and as Handy points out, too dark for those lyrics to be used when the song appeared in the middle of World War II — “it may be your last” was a message everyone already understood all too well), but it’s missing any reference to a bad banana or a seasick crocodile, so it’s immediately disqualified.