Another week, so here we go again.
Another week, so here we go again.
Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:
Kevin Carey: Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins: surprise?
Tom Engelhardt: A Trumpian Snapshot of America: The list of things gone wrong in America is trenchant as usual, but his nutshell conclusion leaves something to be desired:
We're living, that is, in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent it's run at all) by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state. That, in a nutshell, is the America created in the post-9/11 years. Put another way, the U.S. may have failed dismally in its efforts to invade, occupy, and remake Iraq in its own image, but it seems to have invaded, occupied, and remade itself with remarkable success.
Not sure what the last part even means, but the state we're in is clearly due to two inadequately checked notions: one is the fact that we've allowed the rich in America (and throughout much of the world) to become utterly shameless in their pursuit of ever greater wealth; the other is that we've allowed the US and its "allies" to engage in perpetual war. Unfortunately, it's not just the Republicans who have invested in those notions. A large segment of the Democratic Party has too -- notably Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and new DNC Chairman Tom Perez.
Max Paul Friedman: Trump's Refugee Ban Is Even Crueler Than You Think.
Michelle Goldberg: It's Bad: "The first month of the Trump presidency has been more cruel and destructive than the majority of Americans feared. The worst is yet to come." More (although I would have picked a totally different laundry list, emphasizing how mainstream Republicans loom as the real threat to most people):
Every day there's a new Trumpian outrage that in an ordinary presidency would be a multiday scandal: an ostensibly light-hearted threat to invade Mexico, a casual dismissal of a potential Palestinian state, a feud with a reporter or an actor or a department store. Trump lies so much it's as if he's intentionally mocking the impotence of truth. He shamelessly profits off his office, reveling in our powerlessness to stop him. His closest aide is an unkempt racist who has described Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl as a role model. A senior adviser uses her administration perch to hawk the president's daughter's line of polyester-blend workwear in a blatant violation of ethics rules. Trump himself is either enmeshed in a subversive relationship with Vladimir Putin, or he's willing to appear to be. He and his coterie make a fetish of patriotism yet take a perverse antinomian pleasure in defiling the presidency.
I count Goldberg among those left-leaning liberals who actually thought Hillary Clinton promised good progressive policy, as opposed to those of us who saw her as a marginal (but clear) alternative to the vicious slime that other party was offering. Scapegoating Putin and Russia is ridiculous on its face, and wrapped up with the sort of imperialist and belligerent jargon Democrats should know better than spouting, but evidently Clinton's most dead-end supporters still find that preferable to admitting her faults and starting to correct for them.
Glenn Greenwald: The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing US Playbook. Also see: Katrina vanden Heuvel: Neo-McCarthyite furor around Russia is counterproductive.
Nicholas Kulish/et al: Immigration Agents Discover New Freedom to Deport Under Trump. Another example: Australian children's author Mem Fox detained by US border control. Collateral damage: Josh Marshall: Tourism Industry Hit by Trumpism Bigly, also Anne Kim: The Long-Term Economic Wreckage of Trump's Travel Ban.
Oliver Milman: Scott Pruitt vows to slash climate and water pollution regulations at CPAC: Pruitt is Trump's new EPA head -- one of the very worst imaginable people for the job, and likely to be one of the most destructive forces in our near future.
Sarah Posner: CPAC's Flirtation With the Alt-Right Is Turning Awkward.
Steven Simon/Daniel Benjamin: The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House: Specifically, Sebastian Gorka, "an itinerant instructor in the doctrine of irregular warfare and former national security editor at Breitbart," which is, of course, the rock Steve Bannon found him lurking under. Also see: Jacky Fortin: Who Is Sebastian Gorka? A Trump Adviser Comes Out of the Shadows. If you're keeping track of such things, note that Gorka is an immigrant (born in the UK of Hungarian parents, although he is now a US citizen) and was recently arrested (for carrying a gun into an airport, but the charge was later dropped).
Jessica Valenti: Milo Yiannopoulos isn't the only bigot Republicans are cozy with.
Olathe shooting: Friend and widow on US shooting: Surprised not to see any coverage of this in the Wichita Eagle, but BBC is all over it. Olathe is near Kansas City. The shooter targeted several people of Indian descent, first asking if they were "in the United States illegally, questioning where he'd come from." Of course, White House: 'Absurd' to Suggest KS Shooting Linked to Trump's Rhetoric. Also: Jamelle Bouie: A Deafening Silence. Paul Woodward collected this and similar links, including other events following the same pattern.
The Eagle did have a lot of coverage of the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting in Hesston, northwest of Wichita. One tidbit there was that the shooter explained he did meth rather than marijuana because his company (the scene of the shooting) drug-tested employees and meth was harder to detect.
Also a few links less directly tied to the ephemeral in America's bout of political insanity:
Andrew Bacevich: At the Altar of American Greatness: There's a line deep into this piece about how "it's the politics that's gotten smaller," and indeed this piece is a good deal smaller than at first advertised -- see the subtitle: "David Brooks on Making America Great Again." Brooks is normally an easy target, but Bacevich stumbles, declaring "among contemporary journalists, he is our Walter Lippmann, the closest thing we have to an establishment-approved public intellectual." Lippmann retired in 1967, so for me was a famous name that signified little -- even today most of what I know about him I had gleaned from Walter Karp's The Politics of War, which featured him as a prominent hawk behind the so-called Great War, but while he often catered to political power, the main thing he's remembered for was his cynicism about the ignorance and gullibility of the American people. Brooks, on the other hand, is little more than a partisan hack with a bit of cosmopolitan make up to pass muster with New York/Washington elites. Still, it's interesting that Bacevich digs up a Brooks column from 1997 prefiguring Donald Trump (cue Marx's joke about tragedy/farce), titled "A Return to National Greatness" -- a title Brooks reiterated in 2017. Especially precious is the line: "The things Americans do are not for themselves only, but for all mankind." He should pinch himself to recall that he's talking about a country which positively worships the ideal of individuals pursuing their self-interest -- as witnessed by the fact that we just elected as president a guy who has done nothing but for more than fifty years.
Under the circumstances, it's easy to forget that, back in 2003, he and other members of the Church of America the Redeemer devoutly supported the invasion of Iraq. They welcomed war. They urged it. They did so not because Saddam Hussein was uniquely evil -- although he was evil enough -- but because they saw in such a war the means for the United States to accomplish its salvific mission. Toppling Saddam and transforming Iraq would provide the mechanism for affirming and renewing America's "national greatness."
Anyone daring to disagree with that proposition they denounced as craven or cowardly. Writing at the time, Brooks disparaged those opposing the war as mere "marchers." They were effete, pretentious, ineffective, and absurd. [ . . . ]
In refusing to reckon with the results of the war he once so ardently endorsed, Brooks is hardly alone. Members of the Church of America the Redeemer, Democrats and Republicans alike, are demonstrably incapable of rendering an honest accounting of what their missionary efforts have yielded.
Brooks belongs, or once did, to the Church's neoconservative branch. But liberals such as Bill Clinton, along with his secretary of state Madeleine Albright, were congregants in good standing, as were Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton. So, too, are putative conservatives like Senators John McCain, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, all of them subscribing to the belief in the singularity and indispensability of the United States as the chief engine of history, now and forever. [ . . . ]
That Donald Trump inhabits a universe of his own devising, constructed of carefully arranged alt-facts, is no doubt the case. Yet, in truth, much the same can be said of David Brooks and others sharing his view of a country providentially charged to serve as the "successor to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome." In fact, this conception of America's purpose expresses not the intent of providence, which is inherently ambiguous, but their own arrogance and conceit. Out of that conceit comes much mischief. And in the wake of mischief come charlatans like Donald Trump.
Srecko Horvat: Tom Hardy's Taboo goes to the heart of our new imperialist darkness: Not sure the series is that coherent, but the asides like how "colonialism doesn't cause misery only in poorer countries, it boomerangs back to rich countries with their rising inequality" are spot on. Also he notes how today private companies, much like the "honourable" British East India Company two centuries ago, have become far-from-benign forces all around the world (and he didn't even cite Exxon Mobil as an example).
Robin McKie: Biologists say half of all species could be extinct by end of century: Not really a new story: I read a lot about mass extinction back in the 1990s and maybe earlier, when the Alvarez theory of the K-T extinction event became popular and Carl Sagan came up with the notion of "nuclear winter." So, no surprise that it's gotten worse. Still, I'm struck by how the threat has receded in our consciousness as our politicians keep coming up with more urgent short-term crises. Thinking about the end of the century has started to look like a luxury.
John Nichols: Tom Perez Narrowly Defeats Keith Ellison for DNC Chair: Margin over Keith Ellison was 35 votes. It's tempting to regard Perez as a corporate stooge, but Esme Cribb has him saying some useful things, like: "I heard from rural America that the Democratic Party hasn't been there for us recently"; "We also have to redefine our mission"; and "Our unity is our greatest strength, and frankly our unity is Donald Trump's greatest nightmare." Underscoring that unity, he named Ellison "deputy chair" (see Trump Claims DNC Chair Race Was 'Totally Rigged,' Offers No Evidence.
POSTSCRIPT:
Zoë Carpenter/George Zornick: Everything Trump Did in His 5th Week That Actually Matters: Noticed this but thought I had already linked to it.
Stephen F Cohen: Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump
Michael T Klare: In Trump's White House, It's the Billionaires vs. the Bombardiers: I doubt it's that pat. I also picture Steve Bannon and his neo-Nazi (uh, alt-right) contingent as a third faction -- even if they align with the bombardiers, the latter don't necessarily align with them.
Jane Mayer: Dark Money and Donald Trump: By the way, Mayer's important book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, is out in paperback now, with a new preface. Although Trump supposedly ran against dark money during the Republican primaries, he turned out to be the prime beneficiary of the Koch network's outlandish spending, which has in turn made him as much a captive of special interests as anyone he excoriated during the campaign.