We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served.
- White House Chief of Staff John Kelly
This week's featured posts are "The Billie Jean Republicans" -- picture a GOP senator backed by a chorus of corporate donors, denying their responsibility for Trump -- and something a little more serious: "Niger, the Condolence Controversy, and Why the Founders Feared a Professional Military".
In case "Billie Jean" has you trying to remember the Sift's previous poetic posts, they're: "Donnie in the Room" (based on "Casey at the Bat") and "Fatherly Advice to Eric and Don Jr." (based on "If").
This week everybody was talking about the Niger operation, and the distracting controversy it launched
Mostly this is covered in one of the featured posts. But John Kelly has turned into his own issue. Vox' Dara Lind compares his attitude to Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men.
But it’s not just that Kelly doesn’t respect the way that politics works within Washington — the time it takes to make a congressional deal, the way that embarrassing statements can get leaked to eager reporters. He actively thinks that they have America wrong, and that they will never understand it in the way those who serve it will.
Charles Pierce sees Kelly's lying defense of Trump as
a terribly sad moment. Everything and everybody this president* touches goes bad from the inside out.
Matt Yglesias had another depressing thought.
Kelly’s performance today should be a wakeup call to anyone who still thinks there are “adults in the room” who’ll save us.
Occasionally the media speculates that Kelly will get tired of his thankless job and quit. I predict a different scenario: At some point Trump will have wrung all the credibility out of Kelly, and then he'll toss the general away.
There's one more part of Kelly's remarks I can't let go by:
You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor.
Kelly and I grew up in the same era. (He's six years older.) So I can testify that he is totally full of crap on this. Women of our mothers' generation were shown superficial respect -- holding doors for them, etc. -- as long as they lived narrowly scripted lives of service to men. But a woman was not honored if she spoke out in public, or entered the workplace, or sought an advanced degree, or decided not to get married, or did anything else outside the script. Quite the opposite.
and rebukes to Trump without naming him
George W. Bush spoke Thursday in New York. He addressed threats to democracy and said that "when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy." (In case you don't recognize it, that's a reference to the presidential oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution.)
We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism – forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade – forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.
We have seen the return of isolationist sentiments – forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs and drug trafficking tend to emerge.
He also contradicted Trump's claim that the Russia story is "fake news".
America is experiencing the sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s divisions. According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other. This effort is broad, systematic and stealthy, it’s conducted across a range of social media platforms.
He also said "white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed."
In a speech accepting the Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center last Monday, John McCain said:
To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.
We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.
As much as I approve of Republicans giving other Republicans permission to criticize Trump, though, the country needs a lot more from Republican leaders. How do they propose to limit the damage being done by this unfit president, or to remove him?
and healthcare
It looks like the Murray-Alexander bill on healthcare -- the bipartisan one that tries to fix some of the damage Trump has been doing to the health insurance markets -- will get a vote in the Senate. It still seems unlikely to get a vote in the House, and no one -- including Mitch McConnell -- knows what Trump would be willing to sign.
More proof that Trump has no ideas for improving American healthcare: In an appearance with the Greek prime minister Tuesday, Trump took questions. He was asked "What is your healthcare plan, sir?"
He responded with a long ramble justifying what he had just done (cancel CSR payments that reimburse insurance companies for losses on cheap policies to the working poor), criticized insurance companies, pronounced ObamaCare dead, said something about block grants to the states, predicted that he would have the votes to repeal ObamaCare after Congress got done with tax reform, called Democrats "obstructionists" who "have no good policies", bragged about how many judges he has appointed (while criticizing Democrats for slowing down Senate approval of nominees), and denounced insurance-premium increases under ObamaCare.
The reporter followed up: "So is Graham-Cassidy still the plan, sir?" And Trump said: "Yeah, essentially that would be the plan. Yes, block grants."
He has a two-word-answer grasp of the subject, which he hides under mountains of meaningless self-serving verbiage. How should Americans who aren't rich get the care they need and pay for it? He has no idea.
but I eventually got around to looking at the Values Voters Summit
It was last week's news, but I fall behind sometimes.
Trump: "As long as we have pride in our country, confidence in our future, and faith in our God, then America will prevail." The phrase "our God" bothers me. That didn't just pop out of his mouth. This was a scripted teleprompter speech, so the words were chosen. He could have said "faith in God", which would already be controversial in a few ways. But instead he said "faith in our God".
Does America have a national god who is different from the gods of other countries or of the Universe? What about citizens of the United States who don't don't worship the American God? Do they count as "us", as Americans? Is Trump their president too?
I haven't been the only one writing song lyrics. Roy Moore's speech included new lyrics that almost fit the tune of "America the Beautiful", outlining all the ways that today's America seems ugly and evil to him, and calling down God's judgment on us.
Moore and his audience are white instead of black, and the sins he charges against America (abortion, drug abuse, abandoning the death penalty) are different than the ones Rev. Jeremiah Wright focused on (slavery, herding Native Americans onto reservations, putting Japanese Americans into detention camps during World War II, funneling black youth into low-paying jobs or prison rather than educating them). But otherwise, how is this different from the "God damn America" sermon Wright got pilloried for?
and you also might be interested in ...
The Senate moved Congress one step closer to tax reform. It passed a budget resolution that would make a Republican tax-cut bill eligible for reconciliation, letting it pass the Senate with 50 votes plus Vice President Pence. Now they just need to figure out what goes into that bill.
The Trump/Russia legal-fee issue just got weirder. For months, the RNC and the Trump campaign have been paying the legal bills of the President and of Donald Trump Jr., but no one else. Now, Trump says he will use up to $430,000 of his own money to pay legal bills for White House staff and campaign aides. So they'd better say what they're told to say, right?
Fort Worth Weekly uses two local Christian seminaries to illustrate the diversity of American Christianity. If "Christian" means just one thing to you, you might find this enlightening.
After five years at the American Chemical Council, Nancy Beck became a primary EPA decision-maker on toxic chemicals. What could go wrong?
and let's close with something terrestrial
No, it isn't a starship, it's a manta ray. The shot is from the Nature Conservancy's 2017 photo contest. It's not even the winner.
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