Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.
This week's featured post is "What Does Trump's Inner Party Believe?"
This week everybody was still talking about impeachment
Last Monday, a federal court ordered former White House Counsel Don McGahn to obey a congressional subpoena. The subpoena in question wasn't part of the recent Ukraine hearings in the Intelligence Committee, but an earlier follow-up to the Mueller Report, in which McGahn's testimony could be key in establishing an obstruction of justice charge against Trump.
The judge's opinion was sweeping, and would seem relevant to Ukraine-related subpoenas as well. If any Trump officials were looking for permission to ignore Trump's order, this would be it. But it has no direct legal impact on them.
It will also have no immediate effect on McGahn. The Department of Justice is appealing the ruling.
The House Intelligence Committee will discuss its Ukraine report tomorrow. The report goes to the Judiciary Committee, which will compose articles of impeachment.
Trump had a decision to make about the Judiciary hearings that begin on Wednesday: He was offered the chance to have his own lawyers participate, but decided not to. The lack of participation was a major objection Trump supporters made to the Intelligence Committee hearings, but a letter from the White House counsel continues to hold that the impeachment process is unfair.
It is hard for me to imagine Trump agreeing to any process of critical inquiry into his actions. His sense of victimization is axiomatic; if he is being criticized, it is unfair.
While purporting to be outraged by Hunter Biden cashing in on his father's name, the Republican National Committee spent $100K to make Donald Trump Jr.'s book a bestseller.
Last week I mentioned the Fox & Friends phone interview where Trump repeated his absurd claims about Ukraine and the DNC server. The WaPo fact checker found four "whoppers" within ten sentences:
Ukraine does not have the server, the FBI did not need physical possession to investigate, CrowdStrike was not founded by a Ukrainian, and it is not a Ukrainian company. It is dismaying that despite all of the evidence assembled by his top aides, Trump keeps repeating debunked theories and inaccurate claims that he first raised more than two years ago.
There are some days when we wish we were not limited to just Four Pinocchios.
Trump supporters can't talk about impeachment without using the term "witch hunt". Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, knows a thing or two about real witch hunts.
By definition you do not qualify as the victim of a witch hunt if you are the most powerful man on the planet. You do, however, incite a witch hunt when you spew malignant allegations and reckless insinuations, when you broadcast a fictitious narrative, attack those who resist it and charge your critics with a shadowy, sinister plot to destroy you. (Witness intimidation can sound strangely like a witchcraft accusation. Did someone really tweet that everything a middle-aged woman touched during her diplomatic career tended to sour?)
And she calls on Republicans to heed the example of Thomas Brattle, who turned the tide against the Salem trials.
You can walk gutlessly into history behind a deluded man, holding tight to a ridiculous narrative. Or you can follow the lead of Thomas Brattle, in which case someone will be extolling your heroism 327 years from now.
BTW, I didn't do a full family history, but don't believe Stacy is related to Rep. Adam Schiff. At the very least, she is not his wife or daughter.
and Thanksgiving
The weather was kind of dicey in New York on Thurday, which made low-flying balloons a hazard.
During his surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, Trump said he had restarted talks with the Taliban that had blown up in September. Neither the Taliban nor the Afghan government seem to know what he's talking about. But it sounded good, so he said it.
Now there's a War on Thanksgiving. A single Huffington Post article suggesting that environmentally conscious people might want to shrink the carbon footprint of their holiday meal (mainly by locally sourcing their ingredients, emphasizing more vegetarian dishes, and wasting less food) led to multiple Fox News segments claiming that liberals want to "cancel Thanksgiving".
By Tuesday night Trump was chiming in, telling his cultists that liberals want to call the holiday something else. I still haven't figured out what the left-wing name for Thanksgiving is supposed to be, but I'm sure right-wingers will tell me if I watch Fox long enough.
Here's my liberal view: A holiday that emphasizes gratitude seems like a good idea -- though whether or not that holiday needs a religious basis is debatable -- and Thanksgiving seems like a good name for it. It's up to you to decide what you're thankful for or who you should thank for it, but a national gratitude holiday is a good thing.
While I didn't notice any liberals calling for Thanksgiving to be cancelled, I did see many articles this year about how we should stop repeating the First Thanksgiving myth. Author David Silverman recounts the myth like this:
The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story—it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
He also mentions the more subtle myth that "history doesn’t begin for Native people until Europeans arrive". I occasionally still run into this misconception in my own thoughts. A few years ago I was at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, looking at an exhibit that explained the migrations of various Southwestern tribes. I had always pictured the tribes as fixed in their locations until European colonists started jostling them around, so the idea that they had an actual pre-Columbian history -- different eras when different tribes held sway over different regions -- was new to me. Realizing that I had never had that simple thought before was embarrassing.
and the Democratic presidential race
Governor Steve Bullock of Montana dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. The theory of his candidacy was that an outside-Washington moderate who had been successful in a red state would appeal to Democrats whose top priority was to beat Trump. No one seems to be able to make that model work.
Former congressman and Navy admiral Joe Sestak -- another moderate outsider -- also dropped out.
I keep seeing people on social media saying "The polls must be wrong; I don't know anybody who's for Biden." 538's Harry Enten has an answer for that:
Biden's polling in the low 60s with black voters 45 years and older. He's got a 50 point lead on the field with them. This is a group that has stuck with him all year. If you don't get Biden's appeal, you probably need to talk a lot more with this group.
and unrest in foreign countries
The ongoing demonstrations in Iraq have led to the resignation of the prime minister. "Some 400 people have been killed since protests began in Baghdad and other cities at the start of October."
I'm not sure why, but the Trump administration is again withholding military aid from a country in distress. This time it's $100 million for Lebanon. Once again, Russia appears to benefit.
Foreign Policy has an interesting article about the Hong Kong district council elections last week, which were an overwhelming symbolic victory for the pro-democracy protesters. Apparently the Chinese media was so convinced by its own propaganda about a "silent majority" opposed to the protests that they had already written their stories about the electorate's rebuke to the protesters, leaving space to fill in the numbers when they became available.
What caused such an enormous misjudgment? The biggest single problem is this: The people in charge of manipulating Hong Kong public opinion for the CCP are also the people charged with reporting on their own success.
and you also might be interested in ...
A lot of my Facebook friends linked to this article about an outrageous anti-abortion bill in Ohio. Yeah, it's insane. But I have a rule about these things (which I stole from David Wong at Cracked): Don't get excited about a bill just because somebody "introduced" it in some legislature. There are just too many state legislators introducing too many crazy bills; you'll live in perpetual outrage.
This bill was sent to the Criminal Justice committee on November 18. If it comes back out of the committee and still mandates surgical procedures that don't exist, that might be worth your attention. It probably won't.
My quick summary of the Trump economy: The economic expansion that started under Obama has been artificially extended by running up debt. This short-term strategy increases the likelihood of serious problems whenever a recession does finally arrive.
Usually we think about the federal deficit, but the Washington Post observes:
In recent weeks, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and major institutional investors such as BlackRock and American Funds all have sounded the alarm about the mounting corporate obligations.
WaPo blames the problem on low interest rates, saying "rates have never been this low for this long". The large amount of corporate debt might not be a problem if the money were being invested wisely, but the article notes that
the weakest firms have accounted for most of the growth and are increasingly using debt for “financial risk-taking,” such as investor payouts and Wall Street dealmaking, rather than new plants and equipment, according to the IMF.
The structural risk posed by large amounts of debt, as we saw in the real-estate bubble that brought on the Great Recession, is that bankruptcies can cascade: When a borrower can't repay, the lender may become insolvent too, triggering a chain reaction.
Before Colin Kaepernick, there were the Black 14. In 1969, the 14 black players on the University of Wyoming football team met with their coach to discuss wearing a black armband during an upcoming game with BYU to protest racism. The coach kicked them all off the team. Fifty years later the university brought them back.
Gregory Downs (author of After Appomattox, whose central points are discussed in this article), has an interesting suggestion: Rather than talk about "the Civil War", maybe we should call it "the Second American Revolution".
To see the 1870s United States as a Second American Republic operating under a Second Constitution created by a Second American Revolution asks Americans to abandon their dreams of continuity and to develop a new, more vulnerable set of national understandings and also a new sense of the nation’s possibilities. Thinking through the implications of the Second American Revolution might lead us to see the First Founders as less successful and less consequential than celebrators and critics have imagined. As architects of a country that failed, the First American Republic, the First Founders might shimmer as warnings or ideals but not as guides. Americans might have to shed the sense that the Founders possess answers to our current predicaments or blame for our situation.
Whale corpses that wash up on shore turn out to be full of plastic. It's hard to tell if that's what killed them or not, and we have no idea how much plastic is in whales that don't wash up, or in smaller ocean creatures that decay before anybody can examine them.
My annual dose of humility: the NYT's 100 Notable Books of the Year list. This year I've read five, which is more than my usual two: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power, Fall by Neal Stephenson, The Institute by Stephen King, and The Nickel Boys by Colin Whitehead.
The Nickel Boys, I will point out, has one of the great opening lines: "Even in death, the boys were trouble."
I would have added Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer to the list. I haven't finished Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea, yet, but it also seems like a worthy novel. (If you have a 2019 book to add, leave a comment.)
Caliburn International, a corporation with billions of dollars in government contracts, has scrapped plans to host a holiday party at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
Some of those contracts involve "holding unaccompanied migrant children in government custody". Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly is on Caliburn's board. Somebody apparently decided that the appearance of corruption in this party was a little too obvious.
Cartoonist Damian Alexander relates an interesting point about his upbringing: It was OK for girls to admire male characters in fiction or history, but not for boys to admire female characters. A girl might want to be like Spider-Man, but it was weird if a boy wanted to be like Wonder Woman. Alexander comments: "Not allowing boys to look up to and aspire to be like women leads them to believe women are unworthy of admiration."
I remember the same thing, and I wonder if American childhood has significantly changed.
and let's close with a series of unfortunate misunderstandings
When you ask a PhotoShop expert for help, make sure you're clear about what you really want.
1 comment:
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